Being on the road is at once a universal and specifically American literary theme. On a road one is traveling somewhere, with purpose and without it. One arrives or does not. Good and bad things happen. Nothing untoward happens, or the unexpected happens. One’s burdens lighten or increase. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road depends on how the symbol concentrates human life, motive, and hope, and presents a version in which the options have darkly narrowed and when not absolutely narrowed are suspended. They have narrowed insofar as only nightmarish things happen on the road, that one can only expect the unexpected, that the struggle for existence is unrelenting, and that the burdens are absolute, since the nameless man on the road travels with a nameless boy, who is, however, his son whom he must protect at all costs.
What has not contracted to an almost zero point is suspended: one has and does not have a map for the road; one has and does not have a clear purpose beyond making it through the cold day and the even colder night. Everything has changed because of an event, the event of a brilliant light that burnt the world down, folding it in darkness and cold, churning cosmos into chaos, and turning the remnant of humanity on the road either into victims who cannot meet the challenge of chaos and the predators who have adapted, who are the conscienceless rapists, murderers, and cannibals who stalk the road.
The Road succeeds because of the complement of elementary simplicity and the reversion to the absolute elemental beyond or beneath civilization. Nowhere in McCarthy’s oeuvre has he put such sympathetic characters at the center, made us care so much about what happens to them and how things turn out. It catches us up because it is a cry into somewhere that might be nowhere, after God, after humanity, after civilization, after books from a world in ruins, stripped to its elemental core, still burning, shrinking in the cold, and disturbed by creatures who have made their peace with chaos and its impersonal evil.
The journey of the two figures on the road is almost quixotic in that, guided by fragments of a map, they travel the road to a hoped-for somewhere that has not reverted to chaos. They are at once a question, a hope, perhaps even a prayer. Here I am less interested in retelling the story or telling the story of how I came to admire the novel after I had somewhat dismissed it. I want to speak three things: (1) appearances to the contrary, The Road is as symbolic and rich in literary allusion as McCarthy’s more difficult and inflationary texts; (2) The Road is awash is biblical symbolism that seems to function substantively and not simply as literary code; and (3) despite the almost saturating presence of the biblical in The Road as befits the apocalyptic time of uncertainty, McCarthy presents enough of a nihilistic alternative to compel the reader to choose.
Bookishness: Writing Oneself Into the Literary Canon
Of great modern American authors, Cormac McCarthy seems the least given to irony, thus perhaps his circumstance of being an acquired taste. Which does not mean that his work does not abound in irony, including The Road, which can be embraced or dismissed in turn as pulp fiction, journey fiction, or post-apocalyptic literature. At one point in the journey on the perilous road to an unknown destination, whose direction is charted by patches of a larger map wrapped in plastic, the nameless man (father) with an unnamed boy (son) finds himself in a library that is miraculously intact.
The man makes his way to the shelves and thumbs through the books, begins to open one of them, then closes it, and puts it back on the incongruous shelf. This is a moment of judgment. We are past the book; past even the defiance regarding the book upon which civilization was built. The book is not even worth burning. Which makes it all the more surprising when, just as we embark on the journey with the unnamed man and boy across a devastated, at once burnt and frozen landscape, where day and night are not absolutely distinguishable, time barely measurable, and language an almost intolerable burden for subjects traumatized by need and fear, in the opening apparently banal sentence referring to the man waking up in the wood in the nearly impenetrable dark, we are routed to the “dark wood” that opens Dante’s Inferno with a similarly midlife man in crisis. This literary allusion is immediately followed by another by means of an equally plain account of a descent into a bunker. This time we are tipped off by the verbal inflation in the descriptor of “the granitic beast” of the nesting of an allusion to Virgil’s account of Aeneas’ descent into Hades. This would make sense. If Dante provides us with the cornucopia of images for the landscapes of hell, he is anticipated at least by his non-Christian psychopomp who has claims to being the first self-conscious literary connoisseur of the nether regions.
The plainness of the prose in The Road, corresponding not only to the devastation of the landscape vacuumed of color and life, but also the monotony of the journey that cannot be guaranteed a destination, is deceiving. The library may be burned, but it lives on unexpectedly in The Road in the bare and spent prose of both the narrator and father. Of course, a reader of McCarthy might anticipate literary allusions. Yet usually there is a kind of verbal grooming as to where and when we might expect them. We come to anticipate literary allusions when monsters are on the stage and switch suddenly from horrendous violence to pontificate about the roiling and amoral reality beneath our reliable lives. In Blood Meridian, for example, as the language swells in order to be adequate to its sublime objects, for example, desert landscapes, the horrors of gratuitous violence, and lust to dominate and kill, literary allusions proliferate.
But in a book with a verbal downshift to match a post-apocalyptic world of burned-out landscapes, perpetual rain, ash-strewn streams and rivers and leaden seas, perhaps we are entitled to be surprised that dialogue with great world authors not only continues, but turns out to be at least as expansive and possibly more so than can be found in McCarthy’s most self-consciously literary text. The stark and dry lines of The Road are sodden with echoes from world and American literature: Melville’s probing of belief in Moby Dick when in extremis the trappings of convention and religious belief are cast off, and especially the sea as the monotonous landscape hiding the cannibalism that pullulates beneath its surface; Beckett’s reduction of language to meet the moment of complete human destitution, as indicated in all the characters of Waiting for Godot ruled by the injunction that we cannot and must go on, and the dialogue which, even when it obeys the rules of grammar, is banal and useless and filling in time that stretches out endlessly; and Dostoevsky, not now, as in Blood Meridian, saluting the modern demonic will-to-power, but the Dostoevsky who experiments with the Christian rebuttal to nihilism in the figures of Zossima, Alyosha, and Dmitri Karamazov. I will do no more than mark these echoes at this point, though I promise to return to them (and perhaps add a few more) when I more directly address the content of the text.
Let me, however, return to Dante and add Milton, the allusions to whom seem different in kind, in that they are intended to speak to the matrix in which the traveler must trudge. The allusion to Dante’s “dark wood” in the opening line is echoed and reechoed throughout The Road. This suggests that it is a binding motif that encourages us to look deeper into the Dante-McCarthy relation in the infernal landscape.
The constant reference to cold in The Road lines up with Dante’s depiction of a frozen Lucifer in the last circle of hell, just as the threat and explosion of cannibalism corresponds to the behavior of Ugolino in the penultimate circle of hell just above the frozen Satan (Canto 33). The figure of Ugolino, like all the sinners in hell, is constituted by repetition compulsion, while also seeming to serve as a symbol for the monstrous self-will at the bottom of sin, ruled by the instinct not simply to disregard the other, but quite literarily to consume him. Yet, cannibalism lies even deeper in hell. Ugolino’s cannibalism is but an expression of Lucifer’s cannibalism, his everlasting gnawing at Judas, Brutus, and Cassius in eternity, which in turn echoes the Greek myth of Chronos devouring his children.
Milton is slyly indicated when the post-apocalyptic landscape is described as “darkness implacable.” Here the unusually elevated prose and Latinate construction of adjective following noun seems intended to recall the “darkness visible” of Book 1 of Paradise Lost (ln 62-3). Both “darkness implacable” and “darkness visible” function as summaries of the hellish landscape and its possibilities, incoherence (pandemonium), and the fire without light that dissolves everything into a charred mass. My point in drawing attention to the level of literary allusion—and I am far from finished—is to show that even in a book like The Road, which seems to reduce itself to novelistic boilerplate with reduced vocabulary and corrupted syntax (absence of punctuation, odd verbal construction, number repetition in dialogue) McCarthy is self-consciously engaged in writing himself into the literary canon by engaging it fully, indeed, standing both with it and against it.
Arguably, there is no modern American novelist who is so insistently agonistic with respect to his great predecessors, so exuberant in making them relevant, while so casual with respect to striking the wrong note and opening oneself up to the accusation of pretentiousness. Engagement with the literary canon is not only in operation in The Road, it is operating near maximum capacity.
Biblical Allusion and Biblical Intertextuality
In the peregrination of the man and the boy, or father and son, McCarthy not only weaves a web of literary allusion, but also of biblical allusion: Job (complaint in destitution), Genesis (creation as expressive of divine goodness; Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac), Exodus (exile; Moses crossing his arm), but also the Synoptic Gospels (baptism) and Acts and Paul (on the Spirit and fire), but centrally the Gospel of John, Genesis, and the Book of Revelation and their relation to each other. Here I will focus on the latter triad while paying attention to the way they interconnect in McCarthy’s biblical weave that is as thick as what can be found in Faulkner. With respect to John, the Prologue, which was so central in the formation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, is crucial. Only three pages into The Road, we find the father having woken up in the dark wood experience himself confronted by the barren, silent, and godless world, later listed as “darkness implacable.” The experience is raw and unfiltered, though grinded down to generalities:
Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each than the one that had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away of the world.
Not overcome by the darkness’ blind (glaucoma) and numbing stare, the father dips into biblical lexicon to posit his sleeping son as a counterfactual: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (John 1:1). His sleeping son is neither idea nor shade; he is flesh; he is incarnate (John 1:14). Waking up the father has already touched him. Later, the boy (son) will be described as rag and bone, perpetually dirty, constitutionally fearful, almost always cold and hungry. The father and son are so close to each other that they inhere in each other (John 1:1), or as the relationship is expressed in The Road, “each the other’s world entire”—a sentiment echoed prolifically throughout the text by the father, and reechoed at the end of the text by the son and in any event enacted throughout. From the father’s perspective, his son is the only being capable of demonstrating a life that has not already yielded to death and capable of lighting up the darkness that has become “world.” “World” is darkness not simply as privative, but darkness as obstinate refusal of transformation. The light may shine in the darkness, but the darkness knew him not (John 1:5). In The Road darkness is not personal; it is the realm of necessity set against the boy. Throughout the book McCarthy underscores the enormity of the mismatch.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that John 1:5 serves as rivet and pivot of the thick biblical-symbolic weave in the text. It is rivet in that this passage focuses the drama of good and evil, even as it problematizes both the idea of the “good guys” and the glamor of evil. McCarthy is siding with the author of the Prologue that, given the nature of the world, now revealed to be what it was all along, it is a marvel that a word is being spoken into the wordless world, and a light is irritating the darkness whose whole raison d’être is to resist. It is also pivot in two ways.
First, it provides a horizon for a journey in which the nature of the boy (son) is unveiled under the pressure of the horrors in the journey, not only, however, the experience of enduring the realities of cold, hunger, violence and fear, but those moments that elicit the boy’s compassion, for example, his and his father’s encounter with the tattered boy they meet on the road and the terrible scene with the decrepit old man at the end of the book who is delivered a death sentence by the boy’s father by being left naked by the father at the side of the road for having stolen their cart with all their belongings, thereby mortally threatening their lives. The encounter with the boy is a real one-time event in a novel that moves towards the condition of mere chronicle, but it also creates a trope that functions as a human measure recurred to throughout The Road as to what might be owed the unaccommodated innocent in this life. Though the measure is provided by the Gospel of John and the other Gospels, it is patched through Dmitri Karamazov whose Christianity is essentially summed up by his reference to the suffering of the boy that has become figure rather than event. The fact that the Bible in general provides the main symbolic weave in a book that does not seem to announce its symbolic nature does not mean that there are not literary weaves that cross and braid with it, especially when these weaves are themselves self-consciously in conversation with the biblical text.
Second, there is a specific Johannine weave initiated by the challenges that the son has to face, but also how he challenges the darkness. The baptism account in the Gospel of John (1:19ff.), immediately following the Prologue that establishes the nature of the Word, is recalled when having cleaned off the ash from the river, the father washes the blood and brain-spatter of a cannibal from the hair of his son. In addition, the great Eucharistic reflections of John 6 are recalled when the washing of the hair reveals a “golden chalice, good to house a god.” As we might expect, however, McCarthy does not pay homage to theological niceties. The father who washes the son’s hair is not a heavenly father—he has shown his frail humanity in his fierce protectiveness of the boy and in blowing the would-be cannibal’s brains out—the cannibal representing, of course, the parody of the Eucharist. He is like the forerunner, John the Baptist, the one who announces the one who has been promised, the one who may save the world.
In addition, as John 1:5 licenses not only Jesus’s loving and merciful disposition and behavior towards the world, but also connects with the intricate network of “I am” statements (echoing Exodus 3) that make sense of it, such is also the case throughout The Road where McCarthy lures us into accepting identity claims that in a less dramatic and fraught situation, we would dismiss as delusional, and from the point of view of the prerogatives of literature might be set aside as bathetic. In any event, it is perhaps not accidental that in one of the more arresting “I am” statements at the end of The Road, there is a sense of displacement and not generation from the father. The boy says: “I am. I am the one. Yes, I am the one to worry.” Here it seems as if there is an echo of the Farewell Discourses in the Gospel of John, and especially John 16:7 where the Word disappears from view in order for the Spirit who is the Comforter to come and do his work of illuminating and binding. McCarthy does not pretend to be a theologian: in The Road it is not the boy as Word who dies but the father. Finally, the Johannine weave is thickened further by what seems to be a self-conscious recall of John 17:23 where Jesus addresses the God of creation by the very intimate term of Abba, which is Aramaic for “father” or even “dad.” At the very beginning of the book, soon after the father has woken up, his son wakes up. His first words are quintessentially ordinary, yet powerful. He says “Papa,” thereby interpreting the relationship between man and boy, and now in the man’s musings, man and word, as that of father and son. This is epiphany, maybe theophany, in any event the moment when mere biological fact transcends itself into a meaning of eternal significance.
Apocalypse: Event: Decreation: Renewal
In The Road the weave within the biblical weave is the relation between the Prologue and Genesis, on the one hand, and the Prologue and the book of Revelation, on the other, as creation is understood to be an expression of the unaccountable generosity of divine goodness, and apocalypse the disclosure of the chaos covered over, but not entirely negated by a loving and blessed ordering. Not surprisingly in an apocalyptic novel, the relation between apocalypse and genesis is primary, though it is facilitated by the weave of biblical allusion from the Gospel of John inaugurated by the high literature of the Prologue and dramatically riveted and regulated through John 1:5. I would like to speak to the relation of apocalypse to creation under the auspices of decreation. Before I get to that, it is important to remind that if The Road is rightly classed as an apocalyptic text as both event and “unveiling,” it is fundamentally incurious as to why the world ended. It focuses more or less exclusively on the aftermath and how, in particular, the human remnant responds to the devastation that reduces the world to a nothing, aggressive, sullen, indifferent, and if it were not so indifferent, then malicious. From the point of view of experience, it does not matter, or at least no longer matters, whether the cause was human in origin or belongs to the order of cosmic accident such as the meteor strike 66 million years ago that put an abrupt end to the dinosaurs. Which is not to say that there are no traces of the event itself in the “invisible moon” and “banished sun” that circles the earth like “a grieving mother with a lamp,” the burning that never appears to stop linked to an apparently everlasting wintering, and the quakes that rock the frozen ground, and in the order of interpretation ferment the hypothetical of divine judgment.
Yet, if apocalyptic theatrics and etiology can be set aside, still, a fundamental feature of the apocalyptic vision is destruction understood to be essentially an act of decreation. The rationale is laid out with extraordinary clarity near the close of the text:
Perhaps in the world’s destruction, it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic, and coldly secular.
Here we have the calling back of creation to the watery waste of Genesis 1:2, the tohu va bohu. All animal stock of day six of creation (Gen 1:24) reverts to the waste, and though human being has not fully gone, we are talking only of a remnant in which there is no longer the illusion of sovereignty (1:28). Human beings do not preside over anything; indeed, they are ruled by chaos, which is a kind of offensive recalcitrant nothing. This tehomic nothing rules the world, is its matrix. The birds and the fishes that mark day five of creation are nowhere to be found (Gen 1:21-23). That rank or rung of creation has been absolved into the waste. Such is true also of the distinction between day and night and the light shone by the sun and the moon of day four of the creation story (Gen 1:14 -20). While a distinction between night and day remains, it is now between blackness that the moon cannot pierce and the murk that the sun fails to dissipate. The vegetation that might bear fruit of day three (Gen 1:9-13) is gone and the separation of water and land compromised. There is only a relative distinction between sky and water for the rain that punctuates the journey of the father and son seems endless as in the great biblical flood. The separation between sky and water of day two also seems to be seriously compromised (Gen 1:6-8). The world is flat without a horizon and, of course, by implication without meaning or tending towards it. Day one (Gen 1:3-5) the creation of light and separation of light from darkness is compromised on the cosmological front. Day is barely distinguishable from night.
Yet, it is precisely here that McCarthy can pitch his tent as to what remains, switching the code from the cosmological to the soteriological as happens in the Prologue of the Gospel of John. McCarthy is suggesting that to the degree to which the boy is the word that challenges the cold silence, the light that shines out from the appalling darkness, a distinction can be drawn between light and darkness. The behavior of just about everyone in a world of perturbation and collapse, even the behavior of the father, moves towards the condition of the darkness. Yet, the boy as the figure of light, as a figure of fire, is a figure of the Spirit that hovers over the waters (Gen 1:2) and a promise that chaos is conquerable by the word of compassion and empathy that rise beyond the necessities and barbarities of survival. If in the apocalypse creation is reduced to its chaotic studs and struts, the absoluteness of its empire is stopped short by the boy who can be assimilated to the flare that the father, at one point in the apparently destinationless journey, apparently randomly shoots into the air.
With this we can see how McCarthy has modified the “seeing” of John’s apocalypse. The Book of Revelation presents a redeemed heaven and earth that rivals in both certainty and sublimity what is said about the destruction of the world (Rev 21, 22). The Road does not. This is in keeping with its “hero,” who though identified with the word, is often silent, and the little that he has to say linguistically reduced to repetitions of “OK” and “I know.” Yet he is the bearer of “fire” and a form of knowing otherwise than the acceptance of the imperatives of survival summed up in the reluctant “OK” and “I know.” Being a bearer of fire seems to have lower and higher registers. In the lower register it simply is a mark that one is not reduced to the waste entirely by renouncing cannibalism; in the higher register it has to do with substantively transforming the tehomic darkness. The question is whether that power is vested in the father as well as the son. This question is answered at the end of The Road when the dying father tells the son that he will have to carry the fire on behalf of both of them and that he is his “whole heart.” In fact, however, he is hiding an asymmetry: if the son is the whole heart of the father, this heart transcends the father who is a carrier of fire only in the lower and not in the upper or higher register.
Given the thickness of the biblical weave in The Road when coming upon the recurring image of “fire,” there is good reason to think of the Pentecostal fire of Acts 2:1-4, though the image is multivalent and echoes not only the divine fire that Prometheus steals from a jealous Zeus to establish culture and art, but perhaps also the “ever-living fire” (pyr aeizoon) of Heraclitus that is connected equally with logos and becoming. All of these meanings remain in play, even if one could mount a convincing argument that the biblical is dominant. Some features of the Prometheus myth cannot be carried forward; certainly not fire as such or culture, and maybe not even art, although the very existence of The Road itself seems to testify to art’s non-redundancy. There is fire in the ruined world, but it does not distinguish between the non-savage and savage, as the terrible image of the newborn child being cooked on the spit testifies.
In addition, our technical accomplishments appear to have done nothing in terms of forming human beings that can face the catastrophe without reverting to cannibalism. Nevertheless, it is not as if the myth of Prometheus fails to make any contribution: Prometheus is a bearer of hope for a humanity suffering in the dark and the cold. Nonetheless, if Prometheus is being recalled in The Road’s image of fire, the recall itself glimmers and flickers rather than flames: it is doused in sheer stubbornness, of continuing the journey while routinely getting off the road, backtracking, and idling and setting a fire in the middle of it. In fact, it would seem as if Prometheus is blended with Sisyphus. Yet, even this stubbornness is a refusal to the powerful lure of annihilation presented by the opening of the waste as the cosmos is stripped down to what it presupposed and is rarely called to mind. The boy’s mother succumbed to the lure of the matrix in her suicide, and the promise she wrings from her husband that he will kill his beloved son when he could no longer protect him from the ghastly evil that comes out of the murk and stalks the uncertain mapping of the road (a version under necessity of the Abraham-Isaac story)—a promise that he entertains but never carries out. Nevertheless, even read in the most charitable light, the Promethean figuration of fire seems less adequate than the biblical one that goes back to the fire that surrounds and protects the “I am” of Exodus. The biblical symbolic weave is the more adequate because it is the more comprehensive. It embraces faith as well as hope. Crucially, it embraces love as well as hope, the bond of love between the father and the son that is emitted as the spirit. Only this love and this spirit constitute the negentropy that matches the entropy of the matrix.
While maintaining a deep conversation with the book of Revelation as the apocalyptic text of the Western tradition both in itself and as it resounds in the literary canon in Dante, Milton, Melville, and others, McCarthy never hesitates to rewrite. Where fire leads you to in The Road is not the heavenly Jerusalem that can be described in glorious and exhaustive detail as expressive of our achieved communion with the one who sits on the throne who is Alpha and Omega. In The Road, there seems to be neither opening nor appetite for this overwhelming presence. The best we can expect is that God is hidden rather than dead. Instead of the heavenly Jerusalem we have the trout as a religious symbol, but perhaps also of the American pastoral of Thoreau. Of course, as with the image of salmon, the trout figures Christ. More generally, it is an image of wisdom. Thus, the correspondence to the boy and another allusion to the Prologue of John’s Gospel that in turn connects with Proverbs 8:22. Nor should we ignore that just before the trout passage that concludes the text, the woman, who serves as the Marian figure receiving the son, speaks of the breath of God communicated to human beings and passed on by them over the ages. Again, finding literary value only in and through symbolic association, this woman, who unlike the boy’s real mother resists the lure of the matrix, is the true Mary, not the biological mother of the boy. The boy’s biological mother is relegated to the status of an Eve who yielded to temptation, though the temptation succumbed to in this case is the reverse or even inverse of the temptation to be God, but rather, like the characters in Dostoevsky’s The Devils or perhaps even Melville’s Ahab, the temptation to be nothing.
The gorgeous trout passage that concludes The Road is worth quoting in full.
Once there were brook trout in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man himself and they hummed of mystery.
Three observations. First, though the register is the beautiful rather than the sublime, this is a world of color and sensuality, and in terms of renewal less a transfigurative renovation than a pastoral idyll. Second, and relatedly, the image establishes a chain of connections and oppositions with other sea creatures, with the monsters of the deep of Job, of the whale in Moby Dick in which the sea is opaque and its ruler a figure of instinct and power. Third, on examination, and alarmingly, in the memory of yesterday projected into a hoped-for future, it is not clear that human beings will be part of the new earth.
Undecidability in Interpretation
The exposure of the thick weave of biblical allusion throughout The Road rules against the complacent interpretation of the text being an example of the Nietzschean nihilism that McCarthy supposedly illustrates throughout his work. Nonetheless, while acknowledging the wavy and mazy biblical weave in the text, equally we might have to resist bringing in the verdict that not only does the Bible continue to be alive as a cultural code, but it is one unequivocally supported by McCarthy. Of course, the argument about the Bible functioning as mere “code” is one available to any commentator or critic of a text with a manifest pattern of Christian allusion. Here it is unlikely to work, given the ontological vehemence in McCarthy’s language, especially in the reduced state that we find it in The Road in which, in its enunciation, it does have the luxury of not intending the real, even if one cannot be sure that it reaches it. The situation in which the man and boy (refigured as father and son) find themselves represents a hysterical break with reality. Language has no other function than that of attempting to name the darkness and the light that is a trace of its other. Certainly, the biblical weave in the text oftentimes overlaps with the literary weave in which, as I have suggested, Dante and Milton are foremost in that they provide the horizon. Yet, in The Road the biblical weave finds itself competing with a weave of Nietzschean allusion. There are any number of recalls of the death of God throughout the text. Nietzsche’s vision of the death of God as the catastrophic end of meaning is laid down from the opening pages as possibly (though not necessarily) explanatory.
Bedrock this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporary winds to and fro in the void . . . everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air.
This is a paraphrase of Nietzsche’s famous passage on the death of God in The Gay Science (Aphorism 125). According to Nietzsche, only the madman has truly grasped the consequence of the death of God, that is, the loss of authority of a transcendent source of meaning and value to which the world of becoming is riveted. In the famous passage the madman speaks of the cold, of the abolition of the distinction between above and below, and most tellingly of the unchaining of the earth from the sun. In addition, Nietzsche’s rhetorical ordinance seems to be in play a little when a flake of snow falling on the father’s hand is described as like the “last host of Christendom.” Again, straining the narrative realism that is the chosen form of the text, the bedraggled old man whom the father and son meet on the road speaks perfect Nietzsche as he declaims the death of God and insists that the ghoulish specimens that haunt the road are his prophets. As further evidence of the Nietzschean weave, the word “secular” throughout The Road has a Nietzschean aura in that while it points to the state of affairs, it also recalls nothing less than an apocalyptic event. Finally, there is the constant refrain of the term “nothing” as disclosive of the way things are.
In excavating the recurring Nietzschean nihilistic codes, I am far from saying that McCarthy opts for them in the last instance. I have presented abundant evidence of the thick weave of Christian symbols and integration of symbols throughout the text. In addition, for each moment in the text that there is a leaning into the absolute absence of God, there is a moment when the man (father) adopts the Joban stance of protest against a God who is hidden rather than dead and in whose hand lies the secret for all that has and will transpire. Of course, the most open statement about God’s existence and presence in the world, and thus precisely about God not being dead, is provided by the woman who receives the boy (word, wisdom) in the second last paragraph of the book.
Nonetheless, even with this avowal, the Nietzschean option is not defeated. The Christian and Nietzschean options remain in permanent tension throughout The Road, even if the viable version has definitely dispensed the superman (Übermensch). Neither is refused; neither can be unequivocally advocated. Given the apocalypse, which among other things means a loss of certitude, experience is tugged into different lines of interpretation in the text. The expectation is that this will affect the reader, who, to the extent to which she enters the apocalyptic world of the text, comes to understand that fundamental decisions cannot be fully notarized.
This brings me to my second and final point. The Road will not decide for us how we read it, precisely because it is neither science, philosophy, nor religion. It is art captivated by mysteries, structural ambiguities, undecidabilities. Its obligation is to bring them to our attention. After pondering and shifting and without overwhelming evidence one way or the other in this patterned but mazy world, the burden of decision is ours and ours alone. It is we who must decide. Shockingly, Christianity remains a fundamental option even in the apocalypse, or perhaps shockingly because of it.
Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer