The Road

The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel is bleak even by the standards of its subgenre but proves by its end to be the vehicle for a moral and religious allegory.

A father-and-son story, its action takes place over several months of the late childhood of a boy whose mother bore him shortly after a universal cataclysm; that spectacular but obscurely understood event destroyed civilization and most plant and animal life on earth.

The story has the rudimentary but eventful plot of an awful journey of several months during which the dying father struggles constantly to protect his son from a brutal fate, also to protect the son from the son's own dangerous desire to do good to the other helpless wanderers they meet. Trapped in something worse than a war of all against all, the father and son repeatedly remind one another that they are "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire". The son is less able than the father to appreciate the imperative to survive that underlies this credo. Threats to their survival create a more or less constant atmosphere of terror and tension throughout the book.

At the tale's beginning, the unnamed father, literate and well traveled but also capably knowledgeable about machinery and woodcraft, realizes that "there'd be no surviving another winter here" (The Road, p. 4) and sets out on a southeastward journey across what was once the southeastern United States of America. The father coughs blood every morning and knows he is dying. For reasons not fully explained, he considers it important to bring his son not just further south but to the sea as soon as possible.

Before the time the action begins, the boy's mother has already committed suicide not out of the fear that she and the boy will be raped and eaten by marauding gangs but out of the moral certainty of it; human society now consists of bands of cannibals on the one hand (most killing their victims, some feeding on the flesh of the living) and their prey on the other, refugees who scavenge canned food and in one case eat their young at birth. Everyone breathes through a mask. In imagery similar to prospective accounts of "nuclear winter," ash covers the surface of the earth, dust and ash obscure the sun and obliterate the moon; all trees are dead though some have not fallen yet; deadwood for fuel is plentiful; the rivers and the Atlantic Ocean are empty of life. At one point morel mushrooms are found and eaten but no other living things other than the cannibals and the refugees are mentioned.

The father and the son possess a pistol with two bullets, meant for suicide should should this become necessary. The father has trained the son in how to kill himself to avoid being captured, as he had trained his late wife.

In the end, the son survives the father.

Most reviewers have pointed to the son's messianic role, seen in his spontaneous impulses to morality and worship, but visible perhaps as much in the father's expectations as in the son's fulfillment. The Biblical figure that most readily suggests itself as McCarthy's model may be Isaac, the impossible survivor and the bearer of the seed to which an eternal promise is made.

The story's deus ex machina resolution (which has struck several reviewers as perfunctory or insufficiently prepared) points to a faith in humanity reminiscent of Faulkner's Nobel Prize address, but adds a hint, not necessarily endorsed, of a faith in a God who indwells and preserves mankind, whose breath "[is] his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time" (The Road, p. 241).

A note on the route route traced in the book: The father possesses and studies a worn fragmentary map, in which the son also eventually takes an interest. The journey passes through towns and cities whose names are known but never named. The travelers apparently set out some days' journey north of Knoxville, Tennessee, crossing the Tennessee River at that city (with a nod to McCarthy's novel Suttree in the reference to sunken boats under the bridge) and continuing through Gatlinburg, Tennessee, thence across the Great Smoky Mountains probably over Newfound Gap (elevation 5,048 ft above sea level; see below), thence through the Piedmont region of North Carolina, thence southeastward to the coast, perhaps that of South Carolina or Georgia, thence along the coast some distance southward. One rare specific geographical indication in the book is a barn bearing the painted legend See Rock City. One published book review (that of the novelist William Kennedy, entitled "Left Behind," the cover review in the New York Times Book Review for October 8, 2006), apparently not realizing how many barns in the upper South recommend seeing Rock City, has relied on the reference to infer that the route in The Road must pass through Chattanooga, Tennessee; this is clearly impossible ("The pass at the watershed was five thousand feet and it was going to be very cold," The Road, p. 25).