The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale describing a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted years before by an unnamed cataclysm which destroyed civilization and most life on earth. The novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection.In his 2007 interview with Oprah Winfrey for The Oprah Winfrey Show, McCarthy said the inspiration for The Road came during a visit to El Paso, Texas with his young son, about four years prior. Imagining what the city might look like in the future, he pictured "fires on the hill" and thought about his son. He took some initial notes, but did not return to the idea until several years later while in Ireland. Then the novel came to him quickly, and he dedicated it to his son, John Francis McCarthy.
Plot summary
The Road follows a man and a boy, father and son, journeying together for many months across a post-apocalyptic landscape, several years after a great cataclysm has destroyed civilization and most life on earth. What is left of humanity now consists largely of bands of cannibals and their prey, refugees who scavenge for canned food or other surviving foodstuffs. In the novel, ash covers the surface of the earth; in the atmosphere, it obscures the sun and moon, and the two travelers breathe through improvised masks to filter it out. Plants and animals are apparently all dead (dead wood for fuel is plentiful), and the rivers and oceans are seemingly empty of life.
The unnamed father, who is literate, well-traveled, and knowledgeable of machinery, woodcraft, and human biology (when confronting and threatening a cannibal, he is able to list several obscure portions of the brain, at which point the cannibal asks him if he is a doctor), realizes that they cannot survive another winter in their present location and sets out southeastward across what was once the Southeastern United States, largely following the highways. He aims to reach warmer southern climates, and the sea in particular. Along the way, threats to their survival create an atmosphere of terror and tension that persist throughout the book.
The father coughs blood every morning and knows he is dying. He struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation, as well as from what he sees as the son's own dangerous desire to help the other wanderers they meet. They carry a pistol with two bullets, meant for suicide should this become necessary; the father has told the son to kill himself to avoid being captured, and the boy's mother, overwhelmed by this nightmare world, has already committed suicide before the story began. The father struggles in times of extreme danger with the fear that he will have to euthanize his son to prevent him from enduring a more terrible fate – horrific examples of which include chained catamites kept captive by a marauding band and prisoners found locked in a basement in the process of being eaten, their limbs gradually harvested by their captors.
In the face of all of these obstacles, the man and the boy have only each other (McCarthy says that they are "each the other's world entire"). Although the man maintains the pretense, and the boy holds on to the real faith that there is a core of ethics left somewhere in humanity, they repeatedly assure one another that they are among "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire".
In the end, having brought the boy south after extreme hardship but without finding the salvation he had hoped for, the father succumbs to his illness and dies, leaving the boy alone on the road. Three days later, however, the grieving boy encounters a man who has recently been tracking the father and son. This man, who has a wife and two children, adopts the boy, and the narrative's close suggests that the wife of this man is a moral and compassionate woman who treats the boy well, a resolution which vindicates the father's commitment to stay alive and keep moving.
Plot summary
The Road follows a man and a boy, father and son, journeying together for many months across a post-apocalyptic landscape, several years after a great cataclysm has destroyed civilization and most life on earth. What is left of humanity now consists largely of bands of cannibals and their prey, refugees who scavenge for canned food or other surviving foodstuffs. In the novel, ash covers the surface of the earth; in the atmosphere, it obscures the sun and moon, and the two travelers breathe through improvised masks to filter it out. Plants and animals are apparently all dead (dead wood for fuel is plentiful), and the rivers and oceans are seemingly empty of life.
The unnamed father, who is literate, well-traveled, and knowledgeable of machinery, woodcraft, and human biology (when confronting and threatening a cannibal, he is able to list several obscure portions of the brain, at which point the cannibal asks him if he is a doctor), realizes that they cannot survive another winter in their present location and sets out southeastward across what was once the Southeastern United States, largely following the highways. He aims to reach warmer southern climates, and the sea in particular. Along the way, threats to their survival create an atmosphere of terror and tension that persist throughout the book.
The father coughs blood every morning and knows he is dying. He struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation, as well as from what he sees as the son's own dangerous desire to help the other wanderers they meet. They carry a pistol with two bullets, meant for suicide should this become necessary; the father has told the son to kill himself to avoid being captured, and the boy's mother, overwhelmed by this nightmare world, has already committed suicide before the story began. The father struggles in times of extreme danger with the fear that he will have to euthanize his son to prevent him from enduring a more terrible fate – horrific examples of which include chained catamites kept captive by a marauding band and prisoners found locked in a basement in the process of being eaten, their limbs gradually harvested by their captors.
In the face of all of these obstacles, the man and the boy have only each other (McCarthy says that they are "each the other's world entire"). Although the man maintains the pretense, and the boy holds on to the real faith that there is a core of ethics left somewhere in humanity, they repeatedly assure one another that they are among "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire".
In the end, having brought the boy south after extreme hardship but without finding the salvation he had hoped for, the father succumbs to his illness and dies, leaving the boy alone on the road. Three days later, however, the grieving boy encounters a man who has recently been tracking the father and son. This man, who has a wife and two children, adopts the boy, and the narrative's close suggests that the wife of this man is a moral and compassionate woman who treats the boy well, a resolution which vindicates the father's commitment to stay alive and keep moving.
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