The Road Critical Essay
The world is ending, little life remains, the hope of humanity is falling fast and yet there is a single boy and his father left, it seems the only remaining “good guys”. The Road by Cormac McCarthy, is a novel that describes the humanity of the boy and his relationship with his father as they attempt to survive in this lifeless world. The boy starts off the story completely dependent on his father and oblivious to the world around him, as the novel progresses he develops knowledge and skills and slowly becomes less innocent. The father spent the limited energy he could produce to protect the boy’s innocence, but the more they saw the more the boy became less innocent; eventually, when the father can no longer protect the child, all of his innocence is lost forever.
The boy was a child, vulnerable, scared, and blind to the world around him and his father believed it was his job to protect the boy and keep him like that. The world they were living in was not a world a boy should grow up in so the further from reality the boy could be the better his life. The boy’s attitude is demonstrated by his playfulness. A quote reads, “The boy took his truck from the pack and shaped roads in the ash with a stick. The truck tooled along slowly. He made truck noises”(McCarthy 60). The boy is sitting on the ground playing with a toy truck, completely oblivious to the apocalypse happening around him. He makes roads out of ash. He makes truck noises despite the danger they would be in if they actually heard a truck. He has little understanding of their situation and lives his life making the best of everything like children often do.
As the boy grows this innocence slowly trickles away. While on the run, the boy and his father encounter some life threatening experiences and meet the “bad guys” that are out to get them. Only so many of these experiences can happen before the boy losses that child- like obviousness to the world around him. The father is still working hard, “but when he bent to see the boy’s face under the hood of the blanket he very much feared that something was gone that could not be put right again” (McCarthy 136). In this quote the father is referring to the boy’s innocence, gone forever and never able to be replaced. The boy understands the world they are living in and expresses his opinions about the circumstances they find themselves in. Although his innocence is gone his morality and belief in humanity remains present in everything his says and does. The boy develops survival skills from his father and slowly becomes less dependent on him. The man knows that his son is growing up and is only sad that he can no longer be oblivious to the horrible world they are living in.
Eventually the pair reaches the coast, their goal as they travel throughout the novel, and it is there that the roles of father and son truly reverse and the boys completely loses any innocences he had left. The man can no longer protect him, this is highlighted when, “In the shallows beyond the breakwater an ancient corpse rising and falling among the driftwood. He wished he could hide it from the boy but the boy was right. What was there to hide?” (McCarthy 236). The father want so much to move that corpse, hide it from their sight, pretend the world is at peace but even if he moved the corpse the boy would still know. The father can no longer spend any energy protecting the boy’s innocence because there is no longer a point, it is gone forever. On the coast, the boy starts to take over the role of father, he uses the survival skills he has developed along the way and starts to care for the man. The man becomes sick and it is clear he is unable to go on. He tells that boy that is is his job to continue, to keep “carrying the fire”, and to leave him behind. Once the father dies that is what the boy does, he meets another man with a wife and a child and continues with them.
The boy is no longer innocence, Carla M. Sanchez discusses the characteristics of the boy in her article, “Survival and Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Exploring Aquinian Grace and the Boy as Messiah”. She discusses the boy’s and the man’s characters in comparisons, but within her augrument she points out, “the Boy is an “incarnation of fertility” (McCarthy 226) with a luminous innocence that shelters the family from the malice of the outside” (Sanchez). This is the characteristic of the boy that keeps the man and the boy moving. They tell stories of their fantasy worlds, they pretend they are living in peaceful life. Sanchez highlights that bright innocence that the boy had before losing it, but when he lost it he continued to “carry the fire”. In the beginning losing this could have been bad for the man and the boy because it is what keep them going each day, but as the boy developed skills for survival and a better understanding of the actual circumstances they were living in he was able to do more to help. He was eventually able to leave his father and continue to spread his fire to more people.
The father devoted every bit of energy he had, to caring for the small, innocent child, he protected him from the dangerous apocalyptic world they were living in. As a young child the boy did not understand much and brought hope to the father in the hopeless world. As they go on the boy loses his innocence, the father worries that it can never be put back, but this loss helps the boy understand the world he is in and allows the boy to develop the necessary skills to survive. When his father dies he is able to leave and go out on his own, only to meet up with another family. The boy still carries his fire, his hope, his morals, and his belief in humanity. He may not be the happy little innocent boy anymore who plays with trucks using ash to build little toy roads, but now he can survive without his father and spread his hope for the world.
Works Cited
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage Books, 2006.
Sanchez, Carla M. “Survival and Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Exploring Aquinian Grace and the Boy as Messiah.” Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse, 7.05 ed., 2015, www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1031/survival-and-morality-in-cormac-mccarthys-the-road-exploring-aquinian-grace-and-the-boy-as-messiah. Accessed 20 May 2019.