The Role Of Hope In Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road
In the novel The Road, Cormac McCarthy depicts the struggle for survival of a father with his son, in the gray and broken world after doom is bestowed upon almost all of the creatures. However, in this post-apocalyptic world, the worst part of the calamity is not only the damage it brings, but the situation it puts human beings in: the lack of edible food causing many survivors to become cannibals. However, hope plays a significant role on their journey of seeking survival. McCarthy repeatedly points out that they are carrying the “fire” in their hearts. What is that fire? To some extent, the “fire” symbolizes the hope they have. The father and the son educate, influence, remind and encourage each other all the time in order to keep faith alive within themselves. Ashley Kunsa from West Virginia University writes, “The novel is best understood as a linguistic journey toward redemption, a search for meaning and pattern in a seemingly meaningless world — a search that, astonishingly, succeeds.” How is the hope redeemed? In my opinion, hope brings redemption in three aspects, which leads the father and the son to the redemption of life, the innermost hearts, and civilization of the human being.
Hope rescues the lives of the father and son. Contrarily, the mother decides to commit suicide. “What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film.” The mother loses her life because she does not have hope for life. Also, the cannibals, those faithless people who do not commit suicide choose to eat people. In their minds, they believe that eating each other is the only way to live longer, especially now that it is the end of everything, and they are all going to die anyways. Changing how some people think about the world, hopelessness actually turns these people into animals, which only care about their own living and basic desires. This point also corresponds with the father’s words of “carrying the fire” — carrying faith. People do unreasonable and bad things because they do not have any faith in the future. However, the father and the son choose to seek for survival, because they have hope inside. However, we can still see the inner struggles of the father by the contrasts between his dreams and the actual reality. Originally, there is a time that the father has an idea to end their lives, and he teaches the son how to put a gun into his mouth. “If we were going to die would you tell me? I don’t know. We’re not going to die.” The boy is the father’s fire in heart, the hope. The first paragraph of the book shows the depression and fear of the father. However, he feels a little more peaceful and hopeful when he sees that the boy is asleep. On one hand, the father protects his son and desperately wants his son to survive. On the other hand, the boy also motivates the father to survive, too. The father tries his best to look for food, shoes, and shelter, in order to reach the south to sea, to fight with cannibals, to overcome all the obstacles they face and to encourage his son to live. For example, they are lucky enough to escape from the dangerous house of the cannibal. In addition, when the old man tells them the tragic story about his son, the father and the son still believe that they can survive. All these efforts and contributions he makes are due to one reason: he has faith and hope for life. It is the hope that saves their lives.
The father and the son are redeemed by hope not only physically, but also mentally. Hope brings innermost salvation. There are several contrasts between different people in the novel. Many people give up their beautiful virtue and the nature of human beings under the pressure of hunger and death, so they steal, kill, and even eat survivors. For example, in order to live, cannibals concern only their own lives and do not care about anything else like their emotions, moralities or identities, nor the lives of other human beings. That is the reason that leads them to heartlessly deprive victims’ rights of living and treat them like objects to consume. In The Road, there is a place the father and son come across where a group of cannibals are hunting two people, and there is a row of sticks with skulls on top. These sticks with skulls are a sign that cannibals are not only killing other survivors for food, but also act as a certain demonstration — a sign where cannibals exist as a different kind of species from the survivors. These people deny the old social order and try to establish a new one, a cruel one. On the contrary, the father is still trying to obey the moral standards of the former society and to teach his son how to behave in the right way. He keeps faith in his heart and looks forward to the recovery of the pre-disaster human civilization and society. However, there are also some conflicting thoughts between the father and the son. The boy keeps asking his father the question, “Are we still good guys?” There is a striking contrast in that the father kills people for protection purposes, while the boy always wants to help others. One important point is that the boy is born after the doom, so he still has an intrinsic insight about morality. When the father tends to commits a crime, such as killing people, the son observes, experiences, and doubts. He is like the virtue alarm of his father, the hope of his father. The boy tries many times to persuade his father to help others, who are in need, even dying. And when they meet the old man, the father compromises. They give him some food and spend a night with him. In this way, the father’s morality is awakened again. When he saves this old man, he saves himself and his conscience. That’s how hope brings innermost salvation.
Hope rescues the redemption of human civilization. After the calamity, people just want to simply stay alive, and all their demands are basically for food, clothes, and shelters. They no longer have any desires for spiritual enhancement. The mental world seems least important. The concepts of “culture”, “nation,” and “religion” seem meaningless when the world is broken. For example, there is one scene in which the father does not know how to explain the signal of “National Road” to his son because nations do not exist anymore. However, the father has hope, and he carries the fire inside. He still tells bed stories, talks about god with his son, and teaches him how to pray. He continues the human civilization by educating his son about religion and faith. The father still believes in god, which shows his hope as well. In addition, there are many times that the father and son are lucky enough to escape from danger. There is once that the father shoots one cannibal and saves his son using his gun. And there is another incident when they are able to escape from the cannibals’ house when they are almost about to be caught. Because of their faith, they get through these dangerous moments and they survive every dying plight. In addition, after the father’s death, when another man comes to ask the boy to protect him, his kind wife talks about god with the boy as well. “The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him… She would talk to him sometimes about God… She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.” This is a signal of the spiritual continuation. In my opinion, the end of the story is hopeful and promising because it seems that there are still survivors who have hope inside, who carry the fire just like the father and the son. Human beings are recovering from the broken world and continuing their civilization because of “the fire” inside.
“Somehow, McCarthy offers positive traces for the reader to appreciate. The human race might be given a second chance.” Professor Cecilia Lidberg from Luleå University of Technology wrote this in an article. Besides, in an interview, McCarthy said that this book is written for his son. Hence, I prefer to believe that this book is not about despair and helplessness, but about the hope for the future. All the gray depression is foreshadowing the hope and redemption. That is why the story concludes where another family comes to protect the son after his father’s death. The father is carrying the fire so that he can overcome all threats and obstacles to help his son to survive. The boy is carrying the fire in heart, and hope helps him and saves him. The hope leads the father and the son to the redemption of life, heart, and civilization of the human being.
