The Road

In my reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road I have found the novel’s tone and mood to be mostly hopeless and very depressing, but with brief moments of humanity and small glimmers of hope. One scene in particular illustrates the novel’s back-and-forth between hope and despair. The man and boy have just witnessed a beautiful natural scene at a waterfall. Here McCarthy gives us a moment of father-son bonding when the man teaches his son to swim in the freezing water (39). This hopeful scene is punctuated when the man finds some morels on the ground and prepares a hearty and earthy meal with them. Surely, I thought, this is a breakthrough in the text—we can rejoice for the pair’s good luck. However, McCarthy immediately undercuts this hope and optimism when he describes the stories the man tells his son. They were “old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them” (41). By describing the stories as old we are given the sense that these stories of courage and justice are outdated in a post-apocalyptic world in which violence and brutality are commonplace. Furthermore, the stories are told as the man “remembered them.” It seems as if the man could be making up these tales of courage and justice in order to support his son, to give him the motivation to push forward and to survive. This is not an isolated incident and, as we read on, we come across more instances in which the man fabricates stories in order to motivate both himself and his son.