Hello all and welcome to my final blog post. For my last post I wanted to delve into one of the moral concepts I found particularly interesting in McCarthy’s novel, that being his conception and development of what ‘survival’ means.
The Road is a unique story of survival in the way that it develops the moral concept of survival as part of the survival story itself. We learn as the story progresses, there is a clear dichotomy in the morals of ‘survival’. McCarthy’s depictions of the horrors of the body farm make us ponder if survival is merely the preservation of the physical body, or the preservation of ourselves and who we know ourselves to be? Early on in the novel the narrator muses over the degradation of morals after the fall of the world,
“People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes...Others would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it,” (33). We see how his belief in humanity and moral structure dissolves, as well as his admission of guilt for not helping those victims when everything originally went to hell. At first people helped each other, but when no order was reinstated they began to create order of their own, then even that dissolved into murder and heinous acts. He additionally muses on the idea of punishment outweighing crime, suggesting that this whole apocalypse could in fact be a form of punishment, while also implying the punishment of living with oneself after doing such vile things to survive. The son asks the father after they see the body farm,
“We wouldn’t ever eat anybody would we,” (136) prompting a conversation on their form of survival,
“Even if we were starving…
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys.
Yes,” (136). The father knows that to lose their humanity is to lose themselves, that if they allow themselves to become the very monsters they fear then they haven’t survived at all. The idea of moral survival is so important to the father it is all he thinks of when the two are starving to death. Rather than pondering immoral acts of survival he thinks,
“There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all,” (137). We see that even after total dissolution of moral society, he holds onto it tightly so that he may live with himself. One of the things that made me believe the end of this novel was positive, was the fact that he died with his morals intact, and admits on his deathbed that he could not have done what was ‘necessary’ to spare his son if it came to it, showing his unperturbed morals,
“I can’t. I can’t hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I can’t,” (298).
I truly believe the morals of survival that McCarthy portrays in this novel are symbolic of the far more pertinent moral ways that we live in society, and the actions by which we live and succeed. We are not truly living if we act sheerly to survive, we must instead act morally, and endure hardships that could easily be escaped through immoral actions.
Thank you guys all so much for tuning in it means a lot to me!!
The Road is a unique story of survival in the way that it develops the moral concept of survival as part of the survival story itself. We learn as the story progresses, there is a clear dichotomy in the morals of ‘survival’. McCarthy’s depictions of the horrors of the body farm make us ponder if survival is merely the preservation of the physical body, or the preservation of ourselves and who we know ourselves to be? Early on in the novel the narrator muses over the degradation of morals after the fall of the world,
“People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes...Others would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it,” (33). We see how his belief in humanity and moral structure dissolves, as well as his admission of guilt for not helping those victims when everything originally went to hell. At first people helped each other, but when no order was reinstated they began to create order of their own, then even that dissolved into murder and heinous acts. He additionally muses on the idea of punishment outweighing crime, suggesting that this whole apocalypse could in fact be a form of punishment, while also implying the punishment of living with oneself after doing such vile things to survive. The son asks the father after they see the body farm,
“We wouldn’t ever eat anybody would we,” (136) prompting a conversation on their form of survival,
“Even if we were starving…
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys.
Yes,” (136). The father knows that to lose their humanity is to lose themselves, that if they allow themselves to become the very monsters they fear then they haven’t survived at all. The idea of moral survival is so important to the father it is all he thinks of when the two are starving to death. Rather than pondering immoral acts of survival he thinks,
“There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all,” (137). We see that even after total dissolution of moral society, he holds onto it tightly so that he may live with himself. One of the things that made me believe the end of this novel was positive, was the fact that he died with his morals intact, and admits on his deathbed that he could not have done what was ‘necessary’ to spare his son if it came to it, showing his unperturbed morals,
“I can’t. I can’t hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I can’t,” (298).
I truly believe the morals of survival that McCarthy portrays in this novel are symbolic of the far more pertinent moral ways that we live in society, and the actions by which we live and succeed. We are not truly living if we act sheerly to survive, we must instead act morally, and endure hardships that could easily be escaped through immoral actions.
Thank you guys all so much for tuning in it means a lot to me!!
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