7. If every book is an author's attempt to answer one of life's questions, what question is McCarthy and/or Kerouac attempting to answer? Explain.
In The Road, McCarthy seems to be asking the question of how do we keep living where there is seemingly nothing left? The boy and his father are trying to get by, trying to escape to the south and the coast, and trying to just live in a post-apocalyptic world where death, fires, danger, and hopelessness abounds. At one point, the boy and his father come across a set of tracks, embedded into melted tar.
Who is it? said the boy.
I dont know. Who is anybody?
(49)
This interaction between the boy and the father seems to capture the hopelessness of their situation, and the questioning of how to keep going when everything is in ashes (both metaphorically and literally) all around. The bleak life proved to be too much for the boy’s mother – the man’s wife – and she took the easy way out: suicide. She could not face the life, and that is one answer to the question McCarthy is asking here. How do we keep living when there is nothing left? Well sometimes we can’t.
The man and the boy show a different side of this. They have each other to love and protect, which gives them strength and motivation to keep on going, and above all else, they have hope. I think that this is truly the answer to the question being asked here, for, as the mother proved, no one can survive if they have lost hope.
1 comment:
Hi,
I feel like this could be one of the questions that McCarthy was trying to answer. The quote that you chose explains how they were becoming hopeless; and were struggling to move on with their life. Although they were struggling they let the bond they share push them to survive. Throughout the book you could see how much they loved each other. This father son relationship seemed stronger than any other father son relationship. I say this because in most families when they are going through hard times and struggling to survive, they let the anger of the problem pull them away from each other; instead of pulling them closer toward one another.
Bianca*
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