An edited version of this review appeared in the April, 2008, edition of Touchstone
In his two characters, McCarthy presents us with a study of the tension between moral pragmatism and moral purity. In the father, McCarthy has written a character burdened with a responsibility–caring for his son–that complicates his moral choices. He is frequently presented with decisions that demand pragmatism in exchange for their survival, and yet even in transgressing boundaries he seems to acknowledge their fixedness. He justifies this to his son: “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.” Not surprisingly, the father is a more understandable and empathetic character than the son.
In the son, McCarthy has written a character of elemental innocence that throws the pragmatism of the father into sharp relief. The son is strict with himself and his father, always asking if the owners of the houses they loot for food and supplies are alive (in which case they would be stealing) or dead. He is compassionate towards others even when that compassion runs counter to their need to survive. “He was just hungry,” he says, begging his father not to leave a thief without clothes or food that they desperately need themselves. He is certainly a type of Christ figure, but his innocence is human–rooted in his ignorance. He can offer no solutions to the often intractable problems that he and his father face, he can only offer the simple, innocent, and blind response of conscience, which sees only right and wrong, not the necessary.
It is his son’s innocence, along with his life, that the father struggles to preserve as they make their way south. The physical journey that they are making to save their lives becomes a metaphorical journey to preserve something else, something that the father and son call “the fire.” In a moment when it is uncertain whether the father can go on, the son begins:
I want to be with you.
You can’t.
Please.
You can’t, you have to carry the fire.
I don’t know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real, the fire?
Yes it is.
This is what is left. The fire. Just as he refuses to allow the reader to draw easy conclusions about the decisions faced by his characters, McCarthy leaves “the fire” largely undefined, but not indefinable. The fire is what is left when men destroy everything but themselves and drift unmoored from the restraints that civilization places on them. The fire is our most precious and, paradoxically, our most enduring possession. I would say the fire is something akin to mankind’s conscience, which, though it works in each of us individually, is also the common property of all mankind whether they follow it or not. The father’s effort to preserve his son lends weight to this view, for a pure flame is the most precious thing of all, a thing to be preserved at all costs. McCarthy is not the sort of writer to link this fire woodenly to God, and the fire’s source remains as ambiguous as its character. Still, the fire plainly resides in mankind, and near the end of the book when a wise and good character reminds the son that “the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time,” we are, I think, invited to consider the source and character of the fire.
Roughly contemporaneous with the publishing of The Road, we have seen the reemergence on an international scale of a character that used to be called the village atheist. Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, Sam Harris published The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens published God is Not Great. Of these, Hitchens has been most vocal in proclaiming a facet that is common to all three–they believe in the possibility of a Godless morality. The authors profess not only that belief is harmful, but also that morality is possible and preferable without God. Such a morality would be socially constructed, of course, and would assumedly have as its ultimate referent the culture that produced and practiced it. But for these authors, this is infinitely preferable to the idea of an absolute moral law that has as its referent an absolute lawgiver.
We should contemplate, then, what it means that Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road, and what it means that he won the Pulitzer Prize for it. As Christians, we are quick to bemoan the strength of post-modernism and to find all around us the relativism that it breeds. Inevitably, we have imagined the monster as worse and more powerful than it really is. The fact that The Road won a Pulitzer is as much a testament to the enduring and self-apparent wisdom of Truth as it is to McCarthy’s inimitable prose. Like McCarthy’s fire, the Truth is, and remains, because it first was and always has been. We should have more faith in this than we sometimes do.
