Jimbo 1

Maya S. Jimbo

Greg McClure

Writing 39B

28 October, 2018

Rough Draft #1

There are many underlying messages that authors want to desperately convey to their

audience. Cormac McCarthy’s ​The Road​ is no exception. In his book, he conveys many

messages regarding death, life, good, evil, hope, and despair. But the message is more all

encompassing. I believe what the author wants to convey is the importance of duality. The truth

is, we live in a world where one cannot exist without the other: death cannot exist without life,

good cannot exist without evil, and hope cannot exist without despair. We cannot simply regard

one concept without the other.

The viable existence of both life and death is brought to attention through Cormac

McCarthy’s usage of personification. During the man and the boy’s journey on the road, they

meet an old blind man and the travelers have an intelligent conversation about life and death.

The old man explains that “[w]hen we’re all gone at last then there’ll be nobody here but death

and his days will be numbered too” (173). By referring to death as “he,” it demonstrates the

mortality and vulnerability of death. This concept complements with the horror genre convention

that “[horror] does not love death (...) [but] loves life” (Stephen King qtd. in Magistrale and

Morrison 3). The horror we feel towards the decaying world is caused by our love of life and we

feel fear of absolute nullity. Naomi Morgenstern, an Associate Professor of English and

American Literature at the University of Toronto, argues that “[i]n ​The Road​ (...) death drive is
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projected onto an entire world” (82). The “entire world” that Morgenstern refers to encompass

the existence of death as well. So what happens when everything dies? There will be no

boundaries between life and death because the concept of the two will no longer exist.

Cormac McCarthy conveys the existence of good and evil through the irony of the man.

The truth is that there is no clear line between good and bad. In the many scenes where the father

asserts that they are the good guys, there is a conversation where the boy finds hypocrisy in his

father’s reasoning when the man says, “I dont think we’re likely to meet any good guys on the

road” (151). According to Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, a professor in English at

the University of Vermont and essayist of literature of the fantastic respectively, “classic tragedy

and horror art is related” (3). In a way, the man can be seen as the classic tragic hero as well as

the monster in art horror. Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, defines the hero of tragedy as a

character who evokes pity, fear, and catharsis to the audience (205). The man’s role and purpose

as a father keeps him from straying away from his personal morals in the dying world inhabited

by monstrous characters. However, the reader’s expectation of a righteous father is subverted

when we find that the man is willing to find exceptions when he deems his son is in danger. The

brutality he has shown towards the thief demonstrates that he is just as monstrous as the world

they live in. Thus his love and devotion towards his son evokes a sense of pity as well as fear

towards the character. The grayness of the man’s morality makes the character categorically

interstitial. Making the man threatening and impure; and according to Noel Carroll, an American

Philosopher, making him a monster (55). The last component of tragic hero can be felt when the

man finally admits that he is not “going to be okay” (278). We first see the man as a heroic

figure on a mission to protect his son and see him “fall” from his heroic stance as they travel
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along the road. And we feel a sense of relief that the man no longer has to be tormented by the

monstrous world when he passes.

That said, the dual symbolism of the man as a tragic hero and monster conveys the truth

of the existence of good and evil. As asserted in the previous paragraph, the father’s righteous

attempts to protect his son from the world make him, ironically, a “bad guy” as well. This

subverts the art horror genre convention of a clear definition of good vs. evil. But plays on what

Magistrale and Morrison defines as our fear of personal disintegration (2). As the story

progresses, the man and the boy encounters a number of people on the road, but in each contact,

the man’s interaction with them changes. He becomes progressively distrustful of other

characters aside from his son. The world they live in or more specifically, the road, seem to

affect the man negatively in his desperation to protect his son from harm. But can we punish the

man for being a father? But can we overlook the brutal fact that he had murdered the man who

only wanted to survive?

Contrast is used by Cormac McCarthy to explain the existence of hope and despair. The

boy and the woman are used to respectively symbolize the hope and hopelessness of surviving in

the post-apocalyptic world. In one scene of the flashback, there is a debate between the man and

the woman on what action they should take next (56). We expect the mother figure to be a

positive and encouraging character, but we are jarred to a realization of how defeated the mother

is in this scene. Shelley L. Rambo, Associate Professor of Theology at Boston University, claims

that we crave for a happy ending and the recognition of its impossibility (qtd. in Alan Noble 94).

The woman’s sharp tone when she says “[t]hen dont. I cant help you” flushes out the human

vulnerability to the open (57). And the man, and thus the audience, desperately feels the need to
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argue against the mother, yet we are bound immobile due to her stronger reasoning. The

contrasting rhythmic sentence of “[b]reathe it into being and coax it along with words of love”

describing the boy, however, sparks a sense of hope and the need to live and survive if not for

ourselves, but for the boy. In the end, we feel disparity and defeat the moment she walks off into

“eternal nothingness,” but still feel hope at the notion of the boy’s existence.

In the end, Cormac McCarthy establishes the mutual dependency of life and death, good

and evil, and hope and despair in his message.

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Work Cited

Carroll, Noel. “The Nature of Horror.” ​The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,​ vol. 46, no.

1, 1987, pp.51-59.​JSTOR,​ JSTOR,​ ​www.jstor.org/stable/431308​.

Daniels, Charles B., and Sam Scully. “Pity, Fear, and Catharsis in Aristotle's Poetics.” ​Noûs,​ vol.

26, no. 2, 1992, pp. 204–217. ​JSTOR​, JSTOR, ​www.jstor.org/stable/2215735​.

Magistrale, Tony and Michael A. Morrison. Introduction. ​A Dark Night’s Dreaming​. Columbia,

S.C.: University of South Carolina press, 1996. PDF

McCarthy, Cormac. ​The Road.​ New York, Vintage, 2006.

Morgenstern, Naomi. “Postapocalyptic Responsibility: Patriarchy at the End of the World in

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” ​Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist

Ethics​, University of Minnesota Press, MINNEAPOLIS; LONDON, 2018, pp. 73–100.

JSTOR​, ​www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv175sm.5​.

Noble, Alan. “The Absurdity of Hope in Cormac McCarthy's ‘The Road.’” ​South Atlantic

Review,​ vol. 76, no. 3, 2011, pp. 93–109. ​JSTOR,​ JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/43739125​.