The Road

As many of you know, Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic novel, The Road, recently won the Pulitzer and was chosen for the Oprah Winfrey book club. This book was multiply recommended to me, so I finally got around to reading it.SPOILER WARNING: I am going to be discussing the ending of this novel so if you haven't read it and plan to, consider skipping this blog post.As for the rest of you, I'd really love your feedback on the book itself as well as my own personal take on it.This book kept me up for three nights in a row. Not merely because it's a page-turner but because the nightmares it inspired were so terrifying they kept waking me up. This is a book which features roving bands of cannibals, human slavery, amputated people kept alive for human consumption, and the big winner: a dead baby roasting on a spit.The plot is artfully simple: after an unspecified apocalypse renders the planet a dead husk, an unnamed man and his son head South through Appalachia in search of warmer weather while evading cannibals. Thematically it explores, among other things, the question of what is left of humanity after civilization is destroyed. Fertile, fertile territory. But alas, for me the novel failed flamboyantly. Here's why:Failing #1: From the very beginning, this novel announces its purpose to explore the possibility of morality in a world of bare bones survival. But the protagonist is only softly dragged into this moral crisis. The descent into cannibalism and murder is observed by the protagonist but he is never forced to choose between cannibalism and morality himself. When the protagonist and his son find an old man walking the road on the cusp of death, the idea of killing this man and eating him for their own survival is never broached. This is unrealistic as the man and his son are starving. Furthermore what's the point of introducing a moral issue if you're not going to thrust your protagonist right into it?Failing #2: The relentless repetition of spectacularly gruesome cruelty is downright pornographic. Maybe I'm too soft, but if I'm going to be treated to a baby roasting on a spit, there had better be a damn good reason for it. There wasn't. This post-apocalyptic world was basically filled with almost zombie-like bad guys and two good guys trying to escape them. That's not enough. If you're going to put human depravity on display, explore it. It's not inconceivable that in this world one could make a case for cannibalism. Make it. Even if you're going to shred it later.Failing #3: The ending. It is simply inconceivable that this boy would stumble from his freshly deceased father into the loving embrace of a nice Christian family who not only don't eat him but who voluntarily add to their burdens by caring for him. McCarthy spent 241 pages creating a world utterly devoid of hope or human kindness. A world which would, quite literally, eat this little boy alive. Sparing him at the last minute in a quasi-religious way violates both the logic of the story and the moral vision thereof.Unless...There is one way to read the ending that actually almost redeems the whole book. And I'd really love to know if anyone else thought it possible to read it this way. Earlier in the book, the protagonist discusses the danger of happy dreams. When his son wakes from a nightmare, the father tells him that he shouldn't worry about nightmares. It's perfectly natural to have nightmares, after all, when you're on the run from cannibals. When you start having happy dreams, that's when you should worry. I think what McCarthy is getting at here is the idea that any happy or hopeful thought is a kind of escape from reality. And to survive this reality you have to face it in all of its horror. It's possible that the tacked-on happy ending is actually the father's swan song. He knows he is dying from the bloody-cough-inducing radiation that has afflicted him throughout the story. He also knows his son will soon be killed. Gruesomely. Keep in mind the cannibals don't kill you then eat you. They remove one limb at a time while keeping you alive so the meat stays fresh. The father lacks the courage to use his final bullet to kill his son. In his final moments, he succumbs to the happy fantasy of salvation for his son rather than facing the horror he knows his son is about to enter. Such authorial intent is braver and more honest than the tacked-on religious deux ex machina. It also makes The Road even more depressing than it already was.Oh, and what kind of apocalypse kills everything except humans?Thoughts?