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Sam Reviews The Road.
January 18, 2010
The Road is profound. It rivals The Shack for impact, although it approaches spirituality in a dramatically different way. The Shack is about finding hope and peace and renewal with God after an event changes a man’s life forever; The Road paints a landscape where finding peace and hope is impossible in a dying world devoid of God’s presence.
Like the story, the prose is bleak. No punctuation. No quotes. It reinforces the emptiness of a world gone awry.
Despite its bleakness, The Road is inspirational in its portrayal of the power and resilience of the Human Spirit.
The Road’s premise is that a worldwide apocalyptic event has occurred and created the equivalent of nuclear winter. Exactly what that event comprised is never shared, to include whether it was a manmade or natural disaster. We are only told that it consisted of a series of explosions which at a very precise time “stopped the clocks” across the world.
The story’s protagonist is an unnamed man, who with his wife has survived the cataclysm. She is pregnant and gives birth to a boy. As darkness encompasses the earth and all plant and animal life on the planet dies, civilization collapses.
The author never reveals the length of time from when the cataclysmic event occurred until the reader finds himself being introduced to the protagonist and his son, but it appears to be about seven years.
The first truth revealed in The Road is that when civilization ceases to exist, there are three kinds of people. The “wretched”, who abandon all principles and prey on others. The “hopeless”, who succumb to hopelessness and give up, eventually dying. And the “resolute”, who dig deep into their spirits and resolve to carry on, believing that life is worth living even in the most despairing circumstances.
People live in constant fear of passersby, in particular the groups of wretched men who enslave and cannibalize their fellow man. We learn that virtually all children have been cannibalized, and the young boy is a rarity. We also learn that the man’s wife succumbed to hopelessness, that she found living too hard as all natural life around her died and evildoers multiplied. The man has a gun with only two bullets, and the wife wants him when the time comes to be able to spare their son from the brutal treatment and death that awaits him should he fall into the hands of predators. The other bullet would presumably be for him.
The man begs his wife to carry on, but she is no longer able. He appeals to belief in God. She speaks of God’s absence, that God is no longer alive in the world.
Upon her death, the man carries on for the sake of his son.
The second truth is the power and necessity of communication. Society no longer exists to pass wisdom from one generation to the next, and only word of mouth — father to son — remains.
A fascinating theme of the story is the boy being born and growing up in a time after all that was familiar to the survivors has passed.
In one scene the man tries to talk about distances in terms of “as the crow flies”. The boy does his best to understand, never having seen a crow or even a bird for that matter. Over time, the man struggles with whether he should continue to tell the boy stories about how the world used to be — something he started when he still believed that the world might return to what it was. He described abundance, green trees, grass, blue skies, animals — none of which exist in the bleak world they inhabit.
This conversation occurs as the man takes his son on a journey to the “south” on the coast where the man grew up and where he believes it will be safer and warmer. But it is no safer in the south, the oceans have died, too, and the world is no longer warm in the southern regions but rather bitterly cold everywhere. As the man fully realizes that the world is no longer as it was and never will be, he wonders if it makes sense to talk to his son about what used to exist rather than the world as it is.
In the end, the boy who has never known otherwise has more hope for the future than his father.
The third truth is that Civilization is a system of interlocking institutions, and if the system collapses there is little of value that one can cling to that might guarantee access to food, clothing and shelter. The man discovers a bag of gold coins meant to provide its owner the means to purchase provisions as circumstances progressively deteriorate. But there is no one to barter with and nothing to barter for. Survival is all that remains. The man sifts them and then leaves them aside to instead gather food and clean clothing.
Whether intentional or not, The Road contains broad, profound spiritual themes.
It paints a world without God and the full implications of that reality. No sustenance, no hope, no mercy, no assuredness of what is right or wrong. A world of literal darkness. A world of human appetites carried to the extreme in a world unable to satisfy any of them.
The story flips the metaphor of Christ’s birth on its head. Just as Christ’s birth split time in half, so does the cataclysmic event described in the story. But with Christ’s birth, evil was overcome and hope entered the world. In The Road, hope has been crushed and evil unleashed.
The notion of Good versus Evil is made clear in the contrast of “the good guys” with “the bad guys”. The boy repeatedly asks his father to reassure him that they are the good guys, using a simple rule that distinguishes good from bad. “The good guys don’t eat people. We don’t eat people, do we?”
Other Biblical themes are also carried along: the idea that all we put into our minds stays with us forever and therefore we should be careful about what we expose ourselves to and allow to enter our memories; the idea of sacrifice as the man denies himself for the sake of his son; the washing away of sins as the man carefully bathes his son for the first time in many years when they gain access to clean water from a forgotten cistern.
The book ends by stating that all that remains for the boy in the future are things that predated modern man. The rest has turned to ashes.
The Road offers a glimpse of man at his worst and best. Thankfully, it is the best of man that courageously takes the boy’s hand and leads him to face an uncertain future.
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