Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is, among other things, a meditation on morality, what makes human life meaningful, and the relationship between these things and God. While the novel is rife with religious imagery and ideas, it suggests a conception of morality and meaning that is secular in nature. In this paper I show that while the existence of God remains ambiguous throughout the novel, The Road contains both a clear moral code and a view about what makes life meaningful. I describe this moral code and examine its connection with meaning in life.
Along the way, I discuss the struggle of the man and child to live up to the moral code. I then make the case that the views of morality and meaning found in The Road imply that morality does not depend upon God for its existence or justification. Through this discussion, I hope to deepen our understanding both of morality and of The Road. God’s Ambiguity and the Man’s Mission The first words spoken aloud by the man in The Road are: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (McCarthy 5). This statement introduces a fundamental ambiguity that runs throughout the novel.
The man does not declare his son to be the word of God; instead, his utterance is hypothetical in nature. He declares that his son is the word of God or God never spoke. The book of Genesis depicts God as creating through speech (Genesis 1:1-31); a God that does not speak is a God that does not create. Thus, the man’s declaration is that either his son is the word of God, or, for all practical purposes, the universe is a godless one. Many events in the novel can be interpreted in accordance with both possibilities. Consider, for example, the pattern of near demise followed by unlikely rescue that repeats itself throughout the story.
The father and son are on the point of starvation when they discover an underground bunker filled with food (McCarthy 138). Later, facing death by starvation once again, the boy spots a house in the distance, and the house turns out to have food in it (202). Still later, the man finds a flare gun on an abandoned sailboat—a gun that is crucial in a later encounter (240). And, of course, there is the boy’s encounter with the shotgun-toting veteran after the death of his father (281). Are these events little miracles—the hand of God reaching into the burned-out hellscape to protect the child—or are they just strokes of good fortune?
The answer to this question remains unclear. There are hints of divine activity, but they are never more than hints. For instance, the name of the abandoned sailboat is “Pajaro de Esperanza”—bird of hope. The bird of hope is the dove. In the Old Testament, a dove carrying an olive leaf signals to Noah that the waters of the flood are receding (Genesis 8:11). But the sailboat named after the dove brings a message of despair; it originates from Tenerife, a Spanish island off the coast of Africa. It brings the message that the catastrophe that constitutes the backdrop of The Road is worldwide.
A particularly tantalizing illustration of this ambiguity is the father and son’s encounter with an old man who may or may not be named “Ely” (McCarthy 161). This character resembles the Old Testament prophet Elijah in certain ways (see Snyder 81). ?Cormac McCarthy Journal Fall 2010 1 Elijah predicted a drought (1 Kings 17:1); Ely says he knew that the catastrophe (or something like it) was coming—“I always believed in it” (McCarthy 168). Ely wonders about being the last person left alive: “Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself? ” (169).
Elijah tells God that “the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away” (1 Kings 19:10, emphasis added). Elijah wanders in the wilderness and is given food by God, who delivers the food by way of ravens (1 Kings 17:5-7); Ely is fed by the boy and possibly mistakes him for an angel (McCarthy 172). In the book of Malachi, the final book of the Old Testament, Malachi foretells a day of judgment, a day “burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day will leave them neither root nor branch” (Malachi 4:1).
Malachi declares that God will send Elijah in advance of this fiery day of judgment. The book of Malachi—and the Old Testament itself—ends like this: Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse. (Malachi 4:5-6) The mysterious catastrophe of The Road is biblical in scope and it involves fire— a lot of fire. And it has obviously turned the hearts of the man and the child to each other.
These hints suggest that perhaps Ely is a prophet who predicted the catastrophe of The Road and preceded the child, who is the word of God. On the other hand, Ely has lost his faith: “I’m past all that now. Have been for years. Where men cant live gods fare no better” (McCarthy 172). He also denies that his name is “Ely” (171). Strikingly, Ely simultaneously denies the existence of God and declares himself to be a prophet in a single paradoxical sentence: “There is no God and we are his prophets” (170). These aspects of Ely point toward the possibility that God never spoke.
This old man has survived not through divine assistance but rather through random chance; he and all the other survivors of the catastrophe are prophets of atheism, bearing witness to the absence of God from the universe. The uncertainty about God’s presence exists not just in the universe of The Road but also in the mind of the man. At times he tries to convince the child, and possibly himself, that God is still at work in the world: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God” (77).
On an earlier occasion, kneeling Job-like in ashes (Job 2:8), the man expresses doubt about God’s existence: “Are you there? Will I see you at the last? ”1 Like the man, Job goes about “in sunless gloom” (Job 30:28); unlike the man, Job possesses unwavering faith: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth ... then in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:25-27). Job asks God: “Do you have eyes of flesh? ” (Job 10:4). The man wonders: “Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? ” (McCarthy 11-2). The man’s last remark is reminiscent of the advice given to Job by his wife: “Curse God and die” (Job 2:9). Indeed, the man recalls this advice himself later (McCarthy 114).
