THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy - A Writer's Perspective

I am an avid reader and a writer trying to break into the mainstream. I have an affinity for fiction so after having several friends and colleagues suggest I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy I finally decided to give in. I had some credit left on a Barnes & Nobles gift card leftover from Christmas so I figured what the heck so on a whim I picked up Mr. McCarthy’s novel. What I was not prepared for however, was how profound an experience and journey The Road was going to take me on.

Cormac McCarthy is a renowned American writer who has a number of well respected works including The Orchard Keeper and No Country for Old Men which was adapted into a movie that eventually won a Best Picture Oscar in 2007. The Road however is considered by those in the literary world as his magnum opus. It won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007, and was also recently made into a feature film starring Viggo Mortensen. After reading the book myself I understand and appreciate why The Road has earned such acclaim.

The Road is really a simple tale of survival told by a master craftsman in Cormac McCarthy. On the surface it is a story of a man and his son making their way through a post-apocalyptic world. A world savaged by some unnamed disaster which has left civilization in ruins. Underneath however, the story is so much more.

I have never had a book effect me in the way The Road did. I have read books which have made me laugh or cry. There are books I love which invoke a myriad of emotional responses from pure joy to utter disappointment. But, never has a book made me stop and question how I look at the world and myself. It is as if Cormac McCarthy was somehow able to capture the essence or the very soul of the written word, and then set it free on the pages of The Road.

The night I finished reading The Road I was unable to sleep. I could not stop thinking about the imagery and absolute bleak existence of the Man and Boy. As a father myself, I was touched and even frightened on a personal level by the choices the Man had to make regarding his son’s continued survival. Even now, when I find myself with a few minutes alone I am still compelled to try and find an answer as to what I would have done in the same situation as the Man along with the other questions the novel challenged me with.

 

The Road is not an easy read for a number of reasons. Not only is Mr. McCarthy’s style hard to get used to which includes no chapters and limited punctuation especially with dialogue, but the absolute stark and desperate existence the Man and Boy face make you, the reader, uncomfortable and almost afraid to turn the page. Also unlike most novels, in The Road you never learn the characters’ names or any specific places and locations where the characters travel. Even though there is this frustrating vagueness with the story which I feel was a stroke of pure genius on Mr. McCarthy’s part, you cannot help but find yourself emotionally invested in the characters and their plight.

The main character in The Road, the “Man”, is all of us, and his son the “Boy” is hope. Their journey to desperately find something, anything that is better than what they have now mirrors our own struggle to get through life. Their destroyed world where civilization has been reduced to the point where almost all life is gone and what few people remain are split into desperate stragglers just trying to survive from minute to minute or devolved cannibalistic gangs who have lost any shred of humanity is a frightening glimpse at a future none of us want to believe is possible. The Road serves as a reminder and a warning of how fragile a relationship we as a people share with our world and especially our environment.

 The Road by Cormac McCarthy is not for the faint of heart. It will shock you and even in a few instances outright appall you. It compels you to stop and think as well as forces you to question the norms you hold dear and once felt so comfortable with. As a writer myself, I stand in awe of what Cormac McCarthy has created, and even though The Road is a challenging read I could not recommend it more.