The Road - Cormac McCarthy

THE WRITER

McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933. His family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in 1937. He is the third of six children, with three sisters and two brothers. He attended Knoxville Catholic High School.
McCarthy went to the University of Tennessee during 1951-1952 and was a liberal arts major. In 1953, he joined the USAir Force for four years, two of which he spent in Alaska where he hosted a radio show. In 1957, he returned to the University of Tennessee. During his time in college, he published two stories in a student paper and won several writing awards. In 1961, he and fellow university student Lee Holleman were married and had their son Cullen. He left university without earning a degree and moved to Chicago where he wrote his first novel. His marriage ended and he returned to Tennessee.
McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published by Random House in 1965. At Random House, the manuscript found its way to Albert Erskine, who had been William Faulkner´s editor. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy for the next twenty years.
In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy met Anne DeLisle, a singer who became his second wife. McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark. Afterward the couple returned to America. He went on to write Child of God and Suttree.
Supporting himself with the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship, he wrote his next novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, which was published in 1985. The book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles. In a 2006 poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld.
McCarthy finally received widespread recognition in 1992 with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award and was followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, the two subsequent books in a Western trilogy. McCarthy's next book, 2005's No Country for Old Men, stayed with the western setting and themes yet moved to a more contemporary period. It was adapted into a film of the same name by the Coen Brothers. McCarthy's latest book, The Road, was published in 2006, winning international acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for literature. A film adaptation was released on November 25, 2009.


THE ROAD

The Road follows an unnamed father and son journeying together across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some time after a great, unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and almost all life on Earth. Realizing that they will not survive another winter, the father leads the boy South, through a desolate American landscape along a vacant highway, towards the sea. They are sustained only by the vague hope of finding warmth and more "good people" like them, and carrying with them only what is on their backs and what will fit into a damaged supermarket cart.
Because of falling ash, the setting is very cold and dark and the land is devoid of living vegetation. There is frequent rain, snow, and storms. Most of the few human survivors are cannibalistic and/or nomads, scavenging for human flesh. Their presence is noted by their leavings, mutilated and/or decorated skulls.
The father coughs blood every morning and knows he is dying, yet he struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation, as well as from what he sees as the boy's innocently well-meaning, but dangerous desire to help wanderers they meet. Through much of the story, the pistol they carry for protection or suicide has only one bullet. The boy has been told to use it on himself if capture is imminent, to spare himself the horror of death at the hands of the cannibals.
In the face of these obstacles, the man and the boy have only each other (they are "each the other's world entire"). 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 "the good guys," who are "carrying the fire."


QUESTIONS THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

Why are the father and son unnamed in the book?
Is The Road science fiction, a dystopia or simply a story of good versus evil?
¨You're not the one who has to worry about everything.The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said. He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one."
What does the boy represent in the book?