The Road, Post 2, Question 7

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.

The question Cormac McCarthy is trying to answer in The Road is, what does one live for? The characters in the novel, especially the man, struggle with this question throughout.

No one in the book has a home, so they bring their lives with them, as the boy and the man carry all of their belongings in a broken shopping cart. The world has fallen apart, as an unknown catastrophe has wiped out all animals and charred the land beyond repair. Few people have survived, and some of those who have have resorted to cannibalism to survive.

In a world as bleak as this, McCarthy questions the motivation of people to keep going. For an elderly man named Ely that the man and the boy meet on their travels, he just lives, without a pressing goal, sometimes wishing he had died before the world became this way, sometimes grateful to be alive.

“How do you live?

I just keep going.”(168).

“Do you wish you would die?

No. But I might wish I had died. When you’re alive you’ve always got that ahead of you.

Or you might wish you’d never been born.

Well. Beggars can’t be choosers.” (169).

Ely survives because he can, since, as he says, “People give you things” (170). Although Ely is not a threat to the man and the boy, his opinion on survival is similar to the mentality that the cannibals must have. Although the man never has a deep conversation with a cannibal, or any other vagrant on the road, it can be assumed that at the point one resorts to eating other people, boiling limbs or even roasting an infant on a spit, one survives simply because they can.

For the man, the protagonist of The Road, his motivation seems to be his son, whom he protects with his life, denying others food or shelter, in order to increase the chance of his son’s survival. But why does he want his son to survive, if he will just live in a hopeless, empty world?

In the book, the idea of “carrying the fire” is repeated several times. The “fire” symbolizes hope, for humanity, for the boy’s generation, and for the future in general. Perhaps the father finds that, as his days are drawing to a close, he has taught his son all he can about the good in the world, through stories of justice and truth, and through caring for him. Now his son must “carry the fire”, and pass it on to someone else, in the hope that someday, things will get better.

At the end of The Road, the boy is given the choice to stay beside his dead father and die, or travel on with a family he has just met. He leaves with the family, living to “carry the fire”, as his father asked him to.