The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel published in 2006 by Pulitzer Prize Winner Cormac McCarthy. In the story, McCarthy narrates the journey of a man and his son as they struggle to survive while heading southward in search for a warmer climate. What calamity caused the new world is unknown; all that its left is a ravaged and cold landscape incapable of sustaining life, scarce resources, and natural and human violence.
In The Road, McCarthy explores the human longing for the existence of a divine being –more specifically God- through the Man’s perception of the Boy, and their interactions with other survivors.
The role of God in the suffering of humanity is an interrogation that permeates this story of survival. In the absence of any religious or governmental institutions, as well as defined moral laws, survival in the bleak post-apocalyptic America is merely defined by self-preservation practices including violence, crime and in the worst cases, cannibalism. At the beginning of the story, the author describes the Road where the man and the child were traveling on as “Barren, silent, godless,” hinting at the inexistence of a moral framework encompassed by religion, and the absence of a greater being (McCarthy 4). Nevertheless, the man’s first spoken words in the narrative refer directly to God and the child: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (McCarthy 5). This statement opens up an ambivalence regarding the man’s beliefs on the existence of God. The man acknowledges the figure but only hypothetically; he does not explicitly say whether or not he accepts his existence. However, it does reflect that the father sees the child as connected to the sacred, and in a way, as a definitive moral authority in the terrestrial world. This notion of the holiness of the child surfaces throughout the text: first when the Man is stroking the Boy’s hair “Golden chalice, good to house a god”(McCarthy 75), and later on in the novel, when the father suggest to an old man on the Road, Ely, that the child may be an angel or a God (McCarthy 172).
This perception of the Boy being related to the divine shapes in many ways the relationship of the father and the son, to the point were “the Boy was all that stood between him and death” (McCarthy 29). As the man claims the child is “his warrant,” the man’s whole life orbits around keeping the Boy alive: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God” (McCarthy 77). Whether this statement is out of conviction or manipulation, the man is suggesting that their struggle to stay alive has a superior universal reason, an ultimate higher purpose. He later defines this divine mission as “carrying the fire” (McCarthy 83). This metaphor, which becomes a motif throughout the book, relates “the fire” with the hope, the civility, the intrinsic set of morality and the inherent compassion that throughout the Road remains pure in the Boy. It is only through this belief, that both the father and the Boy are able to find the strength they need to push forward in search for food and shelter. At a point in the novel, the Man reassures the child that, because they are “good guys” who “carrying the fire,” nothing bad will happen to them (McCarthy 83). This could be interpreted as the Man suggesting that they are under some type of celestial protection to attenuate his son’s fears.
At several points throughout the text, the father hints at his conflicting but wistful feelings regarding the existence of a higher being. In the first pages, the reader sees him get in his knees, and look at the sky: “Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God" (11-12). This is perhaps the clearest example in the novel of the Man directly addressing God as an active entity. In this moment of despair and hopelessness, he curses him but he also seems to be pleading for his help and mercy. The reader sees a similar situation close after, when the Man has his “eyes closed, arms oaring,” upright to “something nameless in the night, lode or matrix to which he and the stars were common satellite” (McCarthy 15). The Man responds to what he believes is an omniscient force around him. Whether it is the God he was addressing before or another deity is never defined, although the description fits with that of a distant being, quiet in his or her revelation and expression.
Much like the father, the child’s yearning for divinity is also seen in several instances throughout the text. The reader can begin to suspect this at the beginning of the novel when the father asks the Boy what he would do if the man died, and he replied that he would want to die just so he could be with him (McCarthy 11). The Boy seems to believe in an afterlife where he would meet his loved ones, which has an obvious religious connotation. The Boy’s religious inclination comes to light again when they encounter food in the bunker, and he tells his father that he wants to thank the people who gave it to them: "Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff… we're sorry that you didn’t get to eat it and we hope that you're safe in heaven with God." (McCarthy146). This last sentence highlights once again his belief in an afterlife, and introduces the possibility of a heaven. Likewise, after finding a flare pistol, he asked the Man anyone would be able to find them now that they had the tool (McCarthy 246). The father asks him if he means someone like God. The child concedes, responding “Yeah. Somebody like that” (McCarthy 246). Both the child and the father find comfort in knowing that a divine being may be watching over them.
God’s possible existence is an interrogation that other characters throughout the novel carry as well. The most explicit conversation regarding the existence of God occurred between the father and an old Man they encountered on the Road, who identified himself as Ely. The Man asked Ely how he would know if he were the last man on earth. Ely replied that he wouldn’t know, so the Man suggested that God probably would (McCarthy 170). Ely responded saying that “There is No God” and they “are his prophets” (McCarthy 170). With that, he referred to the fact that if there were an all-powerful, all capable being, he wouldn’t let them suffer as much as they were or he wouldn’t have abandoned them in such inhumane and tortured conditions. For Ely, the fact that this new world became a realm of savagery where the most evil parts of humanity reigned was enough proof of the inexistence of a God. “Where men cant live gods fare no better,” with this Ely implies that God is a production of men, and after a certain amount of misery, men start to lose their faith (McCarthy 172).
While it is unclear in the story whether God actually exists or not, the longing for a higher being is present throughout the novel. The Man regards the child as connected with the divine, and both the Man and the Boy seem to find relief in knowing that there might be someone watching over them, and an afterlife that awaits them after death. While this hopeless, inhumane world expands and corrupts almost every living thing, the father and the child remain uncorrupted in their unconditional love. The child functions as a moral coincidence, highlighting the inherent virtue of humanity and the strength of the human spirit in remaining compassionate.
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