Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated with apocalyptic fictions. I was obsessed with The Walking Dead for many years, even reading most of the comic books; I found excitement in the approaching doom that was prophesized to wreak havoc at the end of the year 2012; I’ve only gained familiarity with a few books from the Bible, and Revelations is one of them.
So, it’s no surprise that I fell in love with Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road.
The story follows a father and his young son through the terrain of a post-apocalyptic world. The cause of the apocalypse is never explicitly stated, though based on the ash-covered ground and the ash-colored snow and the dead trees, and the absence of any living creature except for the few humans in the novel (and a dog or two), one may guess that the apocalypse was caused by the intense effects of climate change or perhaps a massive solar flare. Either way, the cause of the doom is not the point of the story; the point is the relationship between a father and a son and the father’s will to push through the hellish purgatory of a world lacking order and perhaps even the presence of God.
I found a copy of this book at a used bookstore, Mr. K’s in North Charleston to be exact, and what initially caught my eye was its cover. I recognized the cover because it was based on the movie adaptation of the novel under the same name, which I have still yet to watch. And being a freshman in college who loved movie and television adaptations of books, I decided to give it shot.
I had no idea what I was walking into. The style of McCarthy, who I had never heard of before but is now perhaps my favorite writer, is like no other. He is obviously inspired by Faulkner, though he pushes the experimental flow-of-consciousness style even further by almost never including punctuations, especially quotations, except for periods.
The opening paragraph of the novel reads:
“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly in the dark.”
The power of this paragraph, the first words of the novel, both terrified and enthralled me. Its uncanny descriptions of the monster in the cave and the fluid way in which McCarthy flows from a dark and blind reality to a dream in a cave that somehow seems more illuminated than the narrator’s awakening.
As the father and son walk into the cave in the dream, I can’t help but think of Plato’s Cave Allegory and I wonder if this dream is almost a reversal of it. As if the father and son are walking away from the world, the world ruined by the effects of the enlightened ideas of humanity, and seeking safety, solace, in the ignorance of the enclosed cave.
However, that then brings me to the imagery of the blind monster dwelling in the cave, given disgusting descriptions yet almost fetal-like ones as well. It abides in a dank cave (i.e., a womb) and is “pale and naked and translucent,” much like a developing embryo.
The novel follows such descriptions throughout. It provides a flow of horror and sadness in one of the most beautiful 300 pages I have ever encountered. McCarthy explores what it means to survive and what it means to be a father in a world dying perhaps even faster than oneself.
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