The Road, by McCarthy (spoilers)

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by SeattleUte

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.

In fact, you could look at this book's structure as nothing more than a journey down a road (which actually reminds me of Huckleberry Finn going down the Mississippi, now that I think about it) with episodic events, with the sole purpose of each event to present an ethical dilemma. Followed by a wrap-up discussion of the ethics between the man and the boy.

A very key point in the novel is when the boy points out the dissonance between what the man says, about them being the good guys, "but we never save anyone."

In fact, without the philosophical struggle between the man and the boy, I don't think you have a novel here. Imagine a scared boy who simply agrees with the man on everything. Boring.

In my own journeys, I have discovered that most people have zero inclination (and perhaps ability) to think about ethics. And to the extent that this novel might go over their heads, this is the reason.

Now, this is not a summation of the novel in its entirety, but it's an essential part of it.