The Road, by McCarthy (spoilers)
 

A friend of mine says this about The Road:

???

Pointlessness? Outcome already set?

I mean I get what he is saying. But seriously, did we read the same book?

I wonder if this is a book that parents will read in a different way than yuppie non-parents.

A very odd response.

I think you hit on the difference, although I don't discount the ability of those without kids to understand The Road.

In any event, your friend's analysis is dead wrong. Quite apart from not understanding the book, he clearly doesn't know the context in which McCarthy wrote the book, as a man who had a child, a son, in old age.

That's partly why I like this book so much. You get such a variety of reactions from readers.

I can feel the man's love for the boy, and it tugs at any father's heart. That a person might not like the story telling style is understandable. It takes a bit to warm up to. But the man's desire to do anything for his son pulls you in.

Mike's friend sounds like an individual without a heart.

I think actually the book is pretty bleak, thematically and dramatically. I think it's about the need to keep trying even when you have absolutely no reason for hope. It's about an ethic of hope absent rational basis for hope. I think he had to give that sliver of reason for hope in the last paragraphs as a suggestion or a hope that there is always reason to hope even if it seems like there isn't. But the novel is pretty bleak. The payoff for the father contining to try is really just those few years he spent with his son amid that blasted environment. That should be enough, hard as such a life was, the novel tells us.

What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die?

What do these questions mean in earth become hell?

And likewise, what it does it mean to live or die in our current world?

What choices do we make to live, while we live?

What choices do we make to die? After all, we are all dying.

In many ways the conversations between the man and the boy are a discussion about the ethics of living. Boiled down to their very essence. The choices that the man makes are not the same as the boy would make. And also the choices that the man makes that he does not articulate to the boy--that is, the decision to kill the boy or not.

It may be silly, but The Road has influenced me on a very small thing. There are these magazines that are sold with windows and without windows. That is, a gap to indicate by a quick glance, at how full the magazine is. This could be useful to the shooter.

But The Road tells me that it is also useful to an enemy.

Not getting the windows. :)

Good questions. Clearly you get it, you have the gift. Stated another way, here is one of my favorite scenes in the McCarthy canon , coming very near the end of the Border Trilogy:

"Billy watched the light bring up the shapes of the water standing in the fields beyond the roadway. Where do we go when we die? he said. I don’t know, the man said. Where are we now?"

This exchange occurs as Billy Parham is sitting under a viaduct, reduced in old age to being a street person by the terrible spirit breaking events of his life. In some respects The Road might be the least bleak of McCarthy's novels. Mabye his son in old age gave him some reason for optimism.

I bogged down in the 2nd book of the Border Trilogy. His philosophical meanderings became extremely tedious, and it just wasn't worth the effort.

You can convey philosophy in story form. Like in The Road. Like in some of the interludes in "For Whom the Bell Tolls". You don't need some random old dude sitting in an abandoned pueblo blathering for page after page after page.