about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

We join a father and son journeying down a desolate but dangerous road cut through postapocalyptic America. They, suffering, were just trying to get to the end. I felt the same, reading this story in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

We're the good guys, the father says. But in time the boy begins to doubt, then grows wholly disbelieving. Through his seared-in allegiance to his son's preservation, the man abandons his capacity to trust, and so loses his humanity.

After figuring this out, the boy sees that, though he is his father's burden, he is the one shouldering the world. His humanity still budding, the boy worries for each damned soul they pass.

Having reached the coast and been turned back around, The Road finally concludes with father-protector dying, and son taking the hand of a stranger; whether this show of desperate hope and resigned trust will be rewarded is unknown.

Cormac McCarthy links hope and trust; and those, with youth. So what does this futuristic tale, published in 2006, say about our fate?

Unlike Cormac McCarthy's one-dimensional dustbin of days, our terrain grows more and more complicated, but also more open, with more people connected and more isolated and stratified at the same time. And here, again, we see that caution and the drive for self-preservation is as indispensable as the capacity for hope and trust. But, moreover, in Cormac McCarthy's world, both persist with us until our dying day. Cynical, pointless doom.

I appreciated that McCarthy's sparse prose reflected the desolate world he created, but I never got into this, and did not enjoy it in any sense.