Literary Criticism of Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Murk of the Future

It is almost maddeningly hypnotic. Like one of those crazy dreams you have when you have overworked yourself with a mundane task until you are completely exhausted and then all you can do in those dreams is the same mundane task you were trying to rest from, over and over again. Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Road, is a tormenting post-apocalyptic journey through the South East portion of the U.S.; a journey taken by a father and his young son over an agonizingly long period of time. In true McCarthy style, the two meet with spine-tingling danger and witness the gruesome horrors committed by small bands of other survivors, and there are enemies and the gray unknown constantly haunting them. If you got some sort of morbid pleasure from reading the grisly scene in McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses where John Grady used the barrel of his pistol to cauterize the bullet wound in his leg (274-75), then you will not be disappointed by the gruesome scenes in The Road either.

From the moment the story begins, the narrative is highly disorienting, the language is often obscure, and the dialogue between “Papa” and the boy (which is the only name we ever know the son by) sounds hollow and stilted, and not only that, but because McCarthy does not use quotation marks and both main characters are male, “he” is a common pronoun shared by father and son throughout the novel, so that it is often difficult to tell for sure who is being quoted in conversations, and their voices flow from one to the other with minor distinction.

Can I ask you something? he said. Yes. Of course. Are we going
to die? Sometime. Not now. And we’re still going south.
Yes. So we’ll be warm. Yes. Okay. Okay what?
Nothing. Just Okay. Go to sleep. Okay. I’m going to blow
out the lamp. Is that okay? Yes. That’s okay. And then later
in the darkness: Can I ask you something? Yes. Of course you
can. What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die
too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay (10-11).

Actually, the dialogues are reminiscent of the kind a father and son might have on one of those old-fashioned “telephones” that you make out of a string and two paper cups; as if each word were uttered, not really for the meaning, but for the sound of language itself, with strained moments in between of listening for the other’s voice.

We are thrust straight into the post-apocalyptic nightmare with one of Papa’s. He is startled awake by one of a creature in a dark cave, where the only light emanates from the boy and himself (3-4). Unfortunately, he wakes from one nightmare into another one. He is lying near the road, in filthy rags, with his hand over his small charge. Grayness colors everything, the sky is dark with smog, the sun never comes out, and there is the constant taste of ash in the air. The narrator is as murky gray as the sky and rivers in The Road. There is a strong sense that the third person narrator is Papa and that he is often addressing the reader in an oblique sort of way because of how the narration flows straight into Papa’s dialogues with no white space or breaks: “He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. 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). The language is eerie; though we sense this moment is supposed to be some Job-like supplication/curse to God, the first sentences almost plea straight off the page to the reader. (Note that I am applying quotation marks, however, McCarthy does not use them.) The third-person narration is used in novels primarily to indicate that the story is happening at the moment it is being read, whereas a first-person narration is usually used to retell a story, as from memory, with the 20/20 vision of revelation (Sontag 17). McCarthy’s third-person narrator tells us the story “as it is happening,” with a murky awareness that he is being listened to, and although the narration is in past-tense, the dialogue lifts off the page in the present to prick the reader’s ears: “I think maybe they are watching, he said. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back” (210). In return, we understand Papa and the boy “through a glass darkly” (KJV 1 Cor. 13:12).

Taking this perspective while reading the novel helped me to empathize with all parties involved. Papa is a representative from our world into the strange, new and hopeless world of post-apocalyptic horror who must try to digest the fact that the old world is gone, and with it, all the things that define what he knows to be language and life, thus, we identify mainly with his illusory experience; the boy is a representative of the new world, born into the chaos and knowing nothing about the old world except for the nearly meaningless stories and facts his father tells him, accepting the world as it has always been for him and adapting to it as he walks through it. Even the boy’s body does not reject the high ash content in the air like his father’s does as they continue their journey southward along the charred piedmont; the man is constantly coughing (237). We never hear the boy cough.

There are hints at other things that may be going on with the narration scattered through the story though. As Papa contemplates the strangely orange morning light of a forest fire burning the remains of the old world away above them, he remembers a ritual from the world that has passed away: “Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember” (31) he says. In a sense, the whole book is a litany of things that the father remembers from the old world. At one point in the story, father and son meet a member of a “bloodcult” that is stalking helpless stragglers on the road, and when Papa tries to convince the man that he will shoot him if he will not cooperate and allow himself to be taken hostage, Papa reveals his knowledge of technical names for parts of the brain, “colliculus and temporal gyrus” (64), for instance. But the litany of technical words used in the novel goes beyond specialized knowledge, of which there is plenty. Pampooties (243), mae west (225), lampblack (261), firedrake (31) and slutlamps (7) are but a few of the many words this man, who is a stranger to the new world, brings from the world that has passed. It is as if he senses that this is the last time these words will ever be used, a sort of negative-Adam of the post-apocalyptic world, taking the names of things back, one by one in his long “litany.”

Papa also seems very comfortable with creating language as they travel the road, describing hagmoss (274), renaming bog people “bogfolk” (24), eliminating dashes in compound words, leaving out commas, speaking the presumably Southern colloquialism (Even More Southern Expressions-II), “in the floor” instead of “on the floor” (79), and describing the world in fragmented sentences. McCarthy is known for this style of writing. He does the same type of thing in All the Pretty Horses, introducing the reader to the world of the Mexican vaquero with words like nopal fruit (88), candelilla wax camps (73) and gachupines (230), as well as writing in the slang of the southwestern cowboy. McCarthy uses his specialized language in John Grady’s world, though not with such intensity and mystifyingly discordant purpose as in Papa’s. He is one of those kinds of esoteric writers the likes of James Joyce and William Faulkner, who uses language with a very deliberate and sometimes misunderstood purpose (Woodward).

McCarthy’s writing, then, pits itself willfully against the modern reader’s expectation for shallow plot and dialogue. The very style that might make you shake your head after a few pages or so and dismiss The Road as another garbage novel is the work of an ingenious author. The language, narration, point-of-view and dialogue all have deep significance that, although mystifying, deserves scholarly examination and a serious approach for years to come.
Even with Papa’s intensely personal dialogues interjected in the story, it becomes more and more difficult to read The Road with the assumption that Papa is the sole third-person narrator. At the end of the book, after caring for his son through years of hardship, constant struggle for food and terrifying close calls with cannibals, Papa dies, but the narration does not end with his death, and the very last entry is narrated in a voice that flows as if it is still coming from the father, including cultured vocabulary like “wimpled” and “vermiculate” (286-87). The boy has to go on without his father, carrying with him all the things he learned from being raised by him, because, although Papa pledged that he would never leave him throughout the novel and often mentally psyched himself up to kill his son if their capture by the “bloodcult” became imminent (11), in the end, he tells the boy that he cannot take his life. It is here, in one of the last conversations the boy has with his father, that we find a clue as to who might become the narrator after Papa’s death.

You said you wouldn’t ever leave me./I know. I’m sorry. You have my
whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always
were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me
and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see./Will I hear you?/Yes. You
will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you’ll
hear me. You have to practice. Just don’t give up. Okay?
Okay (279).

Approaching the story as an oral one, passed from father to son goes a long way to explaining some of the mystifying tactics McCarthy employs in The Road such as using short, separated entries to move the story from scene to scene much like Native American writers N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko use in their works, House Made of Dawn and Ceremony, respectively. In those novels, Silko and Momaday use disorienting, segmented narration to draw the reader into the disoriented experiences of the main characters who are both struggling with the impact of the white man’s wars on their traditional Native American upbringings, and the narrations are patterned after oral stories and the traditional Native American understanding of time as circular.

The boy’s experience in The Road, and the style of the novel, might be compared to the experiences of Momaday and Silko’s main characters and their novel’s formatting in several ways. After all, books are presumably all destroyed in The Road, either by fire or water (187), and words themselves struggle to maintain meaning after McCarthy’s apocalypse. Trees, that is, the source of wood pulp to make paper, are seemingly extinct (72 & 190), at least for a long time to come (one does have to wonder about trees and plants that use fire to re-seed themselves for example). The future of stories for the boy and other survivors, if not given up entirely (267-269), will likely be in the manner of oral stories much like the indigenous people of America. Papa and the boy, and through them, the reader, are caught up in a perpetual cycle of survival, from meal to meal, fire to fire and shelter to shelter, that is reminiscent of the Native American cycle of time. The disorientation Papa and son experience translates to us through the odd dialogues, ambiguous narrators and the choppy, chapter-less style of the novel itself.

One other thing that cannot be dismissed is that traditional Native American stories are often told as if they are happening as they are being told. One example is the creation myth, “The Word of Kyaklo” from the Zuni tribe (Tedlock). The Native American understanding of the emergence (creation) of that tribe is that each time they tell the story, their emergence is being happened again, and their tribe’s survival depends on the retelling of the story. Is it then possible that the story of The Road is an oral one that is not really happening for the first time as we read the story, but falls under the same genre that “The World of Kyaklo” does, an oral emergence narrative re-enacted by survivors of the apocalypse after Papa dies? The answer could very well be no, but The Road is certainly worthy of this sort of comparative question.

There is one other peculiarity in McCarthy’s tale that might be explained by reading it as if it were being told in this re-enactment style. The boy sees another little boy playing near the road, but when he runs after him, the little boy disappears(84), and just prior to that there is also mention of a dog barking (81, 83). But only a few entries later in the book, the narrator, whomever they may be, interrupts the flow of the third-person narrative to correct what the boy really remembers, saying, in first person, that there never was a little boy and that the dog had been following them when the boy’s mother (Papa’s wife) was still alive, when there was still “three cartridges in the pistol.”(87). The narrator’s interjection is a direct commentary to the reader on the boy’s memory. Dennis Tedlock wrote an essay called “The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation in American Indian Religion” about “The Word of Kyaklo,” in which he asserts that storytellers who “happen” the story again are not merely storytellers, but interpreters as well and that this interpreter “does not merely play the parts, but is the narrator and commentator (italics mine) as well…[and] may even improve upon [the story]…or answer a question which it does not answer” (236). Although it is unclear why it is important for us to know that there never really was a little boy, the text here does give us a clue to what happened to the third bullet, which is yet another enigma in a book full of them. This is one particular place in the story where the narrator’s voice and Papa’s are difficult to distinguish. If we were to read The Road as an oral story then this correction would be flowing directly from the narrator as they “play the part” and comment on the story.

The language, narrative style and dialogue are not the only reason that The Road is a difficult one to travel with McCarthy though. He deals us some really tough issues in this post-apocalyptic tale. As the two make their way on the road you begin to get a sense that the story is nauseatingly cyclic: there is almost always a fire to be made, empty stomachs to be fed and the words they always rise to (as a poor substitute for the sun) are: “we have to go” (260). The Road, of course, is ultimately a story about a journey; a story we have read in various versions, many times over in literature. The protagonist’s ostensible purpose is survival: “He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here” (4). But rather quickly we are privileged with the thoughts inside Papa’s head that tells us, “he said that everything depended on reaching the coast, yet waking in the night he knew that all of this was empty and no substance to it” (29).

This becomes a point of contention between Papa and the boy as the two progress through towns and landscape that appear at least somewhat more hospitable than the open road where the “bloodcults” travel in slave trains and carry long lengths of pipe to bludgeon their captives (91-92). They come upon a pleasant waterfall and feast on a nearby cache of morels and the boy remarks, “This is a good place, Papa” (41). The siren call of the waterfall does not escape the man, in fact, he struggles with the awareness of it because the falls and swirling water remind him of a time in the departed world when the rivers were alive with fish, and the fish inevitably remind him of his nightmare that began the tale, and there is something about the creature in his nightmare that he is adverse to that is difficult to work out (41). The fish imagery is likely a reference to fertility (Cepulkauskaite), and therefore, creativity, and perhaps it is here at the waterfall that Papa faces the finality of the boy’s mother’s death as the end of the creativity that embodies life and which was once in him. Regardless, it is very apparent that the waterfall is a turning point in the book, a place where Papa makes a conscious choice to leave behind “a good place”, and this example is not the most provocative one, but a mere foreshadowing of another, more crucial (and to the reader, more bewildering) choice he makes later in the book when they happen upon a house and discover a well-stocked bunker hidden in the yard at a crucial moment when both of them are on the verge of starving to death (137).

What is so distinct and suspenseful about this second, found blessing is that at this point in the book father and son have already been through a treasure hunt that is so similar to the way in which they discover this miracle bunker (i.e. a wooden door in the floor, locked with a padlock, on someone’s property that has to be pried open with a shovel) that the boy is terribly frightened and does not want the father to open it, and yet the father insists: “I know you’re scared. That’s okay. I think there may be things in there and we have to take a look….This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up” (137). The boy’s previous experience with his father’s treasure-digging had opened up a cellar in which the bloodcult had kept prisoners alive in squalor, presumably for later consumption (110).

But this time the man and his son had uncovered a hidden cache of food, clothing, fresh water, a chemical toilet and other necessities that would have lasted both of them a very long time (138). The bunker is such an incredible find in the middle of the story that we are as awed as Papa is as he descends into the ground and finds their deliverance from death. Later on, after they had eaten and slept is when the narrator cruelly tells us, “they weren’t going to be here that long” (144). Of course we know full well that we are holding almost half of the book in our right hand and so this moment of redemption is not the end of the story for the travelers. That is what makes the scenes in the bunker so poignant. I had to ask myself as I was reading what could possibly come after this and why would they ever leave? But, of course, they have not reached the coast yet. Can the plot really be this simple?

I am reminded, here, of the frenzied travels of The Beats of the 1950’s, Jack Kerouac and his friends, back and forth across the United States from New York to San Francisco and down to Mexico as they are fictionalized in Kerouac’s famous book, On the Road. That wild journey was Kerouac’s attempt to make sense out of the senselessness he and his friends felt, as much as it was a book about life: high speed, noise, erratic stops and starts, and intense, soul-seeking conversations. In both McCarthy and Kerouac’s novels, the destination is irrelevant; it is the journey that is important.

However, in The Road there is a strange tension posed by the slow, repetitive motion of the journey to the ambiguous southern coast that Papa and the boy take, and is in direct opposition to the frenzied speed at which Kerouac’s novel progresses. We are made aware of time progressing mainly by the subtle changes in scenery and the gradual shift of responsibility for the journey from father to son; that is, where Kerouac’s frenzied speed conveys to the reader life, McCarthy’s suspension of time suggests the feeling of death. The moment when the balance of responsibility seems to shift decisively towards the boy is in a scene on the beach, where the two have already reached the coast and they have all their worldly belongings stolen from them by a scrawny outcast from one of the surviving “communes.” The shift of power occurs in a vivid way because the storyline carries the reader’s loyalty with the shift as we read the vengeful reaction Papa has to the singular thief’s act of survival. Papa forces the man to strip to complete vulnerability and leaves him for dead (255-259). The shock at this callous, inhumane response, coupled with the boy’s pleas to his father for mercy on the thief’s part bring about a resolute change of power as we read with a sense of satisfaction the next entry and find the two backtracking to the point where they left the thief, to return him his clothing (259-260). From here on out in the book, the boy slowly takes on increasing control until Papa finally dies, leaving the boy to carry on his father’s legacy (281). Despite the scope of time the novel suggests takes place, and the distinct shift in responsibility, we are left keenly aware at the moment Papa dies that his son is still a vulnerable child. He stands helplessly on the road as a stranger approaches him and puts his trust in the stranger without much resistance at all (281-286). Papa’s journey, as an attempt to make sense out of the new world’s senselessness, ends with his discovery that the will to live is out of his control, and his son, as our representative of the new world, is capable of making it where Papa could not.

The final scenes between father and son are about as heart-wrenching as the story gets, and perhaps the only scenes that could have brought tears to my eyes, but it was a flood of tears that I had expected, that never came. The rest of the scenes that my conscience told me should have provoked an emotional reaction fell with a thud. I was completely unmoved. Cannibalism, a baby being spit-roasted over a fire, humans kept like livestock in a cellar, nothing McCarthy wrote about shocked me or moved me to tears. For this reason, McCarthy’s attempt to use his well-researched vocabulary and draw the reader into the peculiar place between two worlds was just about overlooked the first time I read it through, and I will admit, blushingly, that I wanted to toss the book in the trash. I do not think McCarthy would be a bit surprised. Thirty-five years ago, Robert Coles wrote a review about one of McCarthy’s early books, Child of God, in which he noted in McCarthy’s writing a “stubborn refusal to bend his writing to the literary and intellectual demands of our era,” and that his “fate is to be relatively unknown and often misinterpreted” (qtd. in Woodward). I believe this is an understatement, and that Virginia Woolf would heartily agree.

In 1929, Woolf wrote a little essay about writing in which she pinpoints the authorial quality that makes a piece of literature (as opposed to books in general) “fountains of perpetual life” (100). She happened upon Samuel T. Coleridge’s statement that “a great mind is androgynous” (qtd. in Woolf 97). She boldly goes on to define an androgynous mind to mean one that “is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided” (97). This passage from A Room of One’s Own, occurred to me late at night as I searched for some way in which to rescue The Road from its certain “disappearance” into my trashcan as soon as this paper is finalized and graded. Because, despite all that I have purposed about The Road, despite my attempts at literary comparisons on my journey with Papa and the boy, there still remains the intuitiveness with which my first impression was made of the book that I cannot ignore, and that is, that something is grimly pretentious (or is it portentous?) in McCarthy’s design that utterly kills my emotional reaction to it. The oppression of it was almost unbearable. Strangely enough, the zenith of this oppression came not as a response to the narrative or dialogues, but it occurred when I asked a couple men (both fathers) to read the most obvious dialogues that epitomized this pretense, such as the first one I quoted in this paper. The unanimous answer to the question, “Would you talk this way to your son?” was “yes.” I candidly admit to my overreaction: I went home and wept, for the end of the world had already arrived, in my mind. I lost sleep over it, but in my insomnia I finally remembered what Virginia Woolf had said. It was then that I realized the self-effacing (dare I call it literarily suicidal?) genius of Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy’s style in The Road is unfalteringly and divisively masculine, and for him it can be written no other way because Woolf’s androgynous author could not craft a world in which the last civilized woman, in Papa’s estimation, had destroyed herself. The boy’s mother had presumably killed herself with a sharp piece of obsidian before the story even begins, (58) and with her dies Papa’s creative will: “Sometimes the child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past. What would you like? But he stopped making things up because those things were not true either and the telling made him feel bad” (53-54). Even if we assume that at some points in the story Papa is the narrator who uses obscure language with ease, that obscure language rarely comes out in the dialogues Papa speaks throughout the book, and the “deadness” of Papa’s dialogues, as a representation of our viewpoint, weighs the heaviest, and causes his words (and with it our emotions) to fall “plump to the ground—dead” (Woolf 100). With Woolf’s words I finally resolved to accept that The Road was one of those books that not only “celebrate[s} male virtues, enforce[s] male values and describe[s] the world of men; it is that the emotion with which [this book is] permeated is to a woman incomprehensible….and lack[s] suggestive power” (Woolf 100-101); this is precisely the kind of book she categorized as not being a “fountain of perpetual life” (100).

McCarthy’s form so precisely molds to his content that his authorial “creativity” and “incandescence” are ultimately snuffed out along with Papa’s. Unfortunately, his unwavering steadfastness to his principles of writing make The Road come off tinny, impervious, unimaginative, dull and divisive to the casual reader, most especially, the female one; in writing this book, I am convinced that McCarthy has, in effect, noosed himself for the sake of his latest book. I can hear McCarthy laughing darkly at my suggestion: “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed…I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea” (qtd. in Woodward). It is up to literary criticisms of the sort I began with to cut the rope and resuscitate the brilliant author of The Road.

Works Cited

Cepulkauskaite, Ieva. “What Do the Symbols Hide?” 1998. Sociumas.lt. 6/14/2009. <http://www.sociumas.lt/Eng/Nr15/simboliai.asp>

Coles, Robert. “The Stranger.” The New Yorker. August 2, 1974. 87-90.
“Even More Southern Expressions-II.” 5/27/2009. USASouthmouth.com. 2001-2009. http://usads.ms11.net/evenmoresouthmouth2.html

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Group, 1955.

KJV. BibleGateway.com. 5/27/2009. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013;&version=9;

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. New York, NY: Harper and Row, Publishers Inc, 1966.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1977.

Sontag, Susan. “Where the Stress Falls.” Where the Stress Falls. New York: Picador USA, 2001.

Tedlock, Dennis. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. 233-246.

Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” 4/19/92. New York Times.com. 5/20/2009. < http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html?_r=2>

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Florida: Harcourt, 1929.