The Road Essay

Lurking Decisions

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-/ I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference,” (Robert Frost). What Robert Frost deals with in his poem, The Road Not Taken, is deciding which way to turn when forced to make a decision. How do you know which path to take? How do you know which way will take you a little closer to being the moral person that we should all wish to be? Sometimes you make the right decision, sometimes you make the decision right. Cormac McCarthy deals with the same dilemma in his novel The Road. The story tells the tale of a boy and his father, traveling south to escape the hard winter that is falling in a world devastated by a nuclear war. Along the way, they encounter other survivors, cannibals, and rapists. McCarthy uses his book to examine why it is that some humans continue to hope in the face of such overwhelming odds, and why it is that others give up in the same situations at the specific moments they do.

The father, who, like his son, remains unnamed throughout the entire story, feels obligated to keep on living to protect his remaining flesh and blood; his only son. His loyalty to his son is so deep that when his son asked, “What would you do if I died?” (McCarthy 11), the father replies, “If you died I would want to die too…So I could be with you,” (McCarthy 11). The father loves his son so much that he cannot possibly go on without him. The man is constantly being faced with the opportunity to kill himself and his son yet time after time he chooses to live in this bleak world. The boy is a little sliver of hope in a place filled with despair. It has been the man and his son against the world for a long time and the father would be willing to kill himself because he views it as his job as a father to be self-sacrificial. The father also tries to look for the good in their world and share it whenever the opportunity arises. When the father finds a Coca Cola, he gives it to his son saying, “It’s a treat. For you,” (McCarthy 23). This simple gesture shows that through all the despair, there are still moments of lightness to be found. He takes joy in doting upon his son in the most innocent ways possible. The father continues to persevere with the hope that the next step would be the salvation of him and his son. His primal desire to stay alive is so strong, despite the fact that dying seems far more preferable. “We’re going to be okay…and nothing bad is going to happen to us[?]/ That’s right,” (McCarthy 83). The loneliness, fear, starvation, sickness, and abject horrors of the world as it remains do not seem to phase the man. The father realizes that it is braver to live in the face of unrelenting misery and pain than to die and hope for a surcease to the hell that the world has become. Constantly, the man seems to only see the fight to stay alive, and he tries to instill into his son the hope that there may yet still be a remnant of true humanity somewhere, holding on to the ethical and moral ideals that he still cherishes. All they have to do is find it.

However, while the son is surrounded by such a strong and centered father, he lacks a mother. In a flashback, the man remembers his wife’s decision to commit suicide rather than continue the struggle. For her, death is a release: “It’s meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I’ve taken another lover. He can give me what you cannot./ Death is not a lover./Oh yes he is,” (McCarthy 57). The mother could not find it in her to put herself in a situation where survival is tremendously difficult. By calling death a lover, she rejects life and labels it as something to be hated, despised, and detested. Through death, she can rid herself of the hopelessness that never leaves her. She can escape her own self. The mother lost the capacity to think about goodness and beauty in any meaningful way. Alas, “She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. She would do it with a flake of obsidian. He’d taught her himself. Sharper than steel,” (McCarthy 58). This cannot simply be fortuitous. Using a “flake of obsidian”, not a knife, cannot be a mere coincidence. One of the very first things that humanoids did in the evolution of ideas, one of the very first things that opened the long path of intellectual and