The Road (Vintage International) by Cormac McCarthy (PDF)

Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son’s fight to survive, this “tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy’s stature as a living master. It’s gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful” (San Francisco Chronicle).A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.The Roadis the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.Look for Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Passenger.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Cormac McCarthy presents bleak as no other writer can. While I was reading The Road, several times I thought that I’ll never again believe a writer who uses the word “hopeless” to describe the plight of their character. In The Road, there is nothing but hopelessness. Almost. Which leads to where I struggled with this novel.I’m giving it 5 stars, though it deserves at least 6 even though I think it has a few flaws. And even with 6 stars, I strongly suspect he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize not so much for this work as much as for his body of work. If you can stomach the astounding violence in Blood Meriden, it is the far better book of the two.On the off chance, you don’t already know the details of the plot, this is your spoiler warning.I have long avoided reading The Road though friends have encouraged me to. I only read it after reading McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.I’ve long avoided the novel because the premise is that they are traveling down a road in a hostile, post-apocalypse setting. One of the first things you learn as a combat soldier is you never take the road. In the military, these are called “natural lines of drift.” It’s a clever way to say “the route people will take”. If you have ever walked across fields that cows frequent, you know what I mean. Cows find the easiest path and tread it over and over. If you want to kill a cow, just wait along one of those paths. Roads for humans are the same. If you want to kill a human, just wait along a road.This world of McCarthy’s is populated with “bad guys” who are almost invariably cannibals. This is because there is simply no food left, no living thing other than the last scraps of humanity preying on each other. They are often also on the road or setting up ambushes along it. Several times during the story, the man, and the boy avoid dying in such encounters. Too many times to my thinking. So, if you take the road literally, the entire premise seems flaky.But the road is needed as a literary device: The two main characters have to start somewhere and end somewhere else. It is both physical and metaphorical. So they travel a road for hundreds and hundreds of miles, miraculously, without getting hurt.I was so taken with McCarthy’s writing after Blood Meridian, I decided to read The Road in spite of my doubts about their travels on this road of theirs. So getting into the book, and starting down the road, the next issue I had was that they were pushing a shopping cart full of their meager belongings.You may see homeless people pushing shopping carts under bridges or down a sidewalk. You don’t see people pushing shopping carts hundreds of miles over roads after a decade of neglect and (apparently) nuclear blasts. To his credit, McCarthy had his character’s wear out one and often had to dig a path through sand or snow to keep the cart going. Doable? Maybe…for a while. But the doable part had another issue. It takes a lot of water and a lot of calories to keep pushing such a cart.The Road‘s landscape — world — is depressingly bleak and gray; even the snow falls gray. Rivers are described as ugly sludge. For much of the book, I wondered where they were getting water clean enough to drink. Though they stumbled across a few forgotten caches of food and water from time to time, not until the last few pages did we actually see them getting water out of a creek, straining it to clean it. It was a weak throw to acknowledging how they were getting their water. But he did not share it until the end of the book because it mitigates the desolate, rotted Earth images of the earlier portion of the book. Maybe the streams are not quite so dirty.Another problem I had with the book was how they were getting enough calories to keep their strenuous trek going (in freezing weather, no less). I’ve lived outside doing hard work for weeks at a time. You burn 3K calories a day…easily. That is a lot of food.When the book starts, there is no explanation of how they came to have a cart full of supplies. No matter. But as they deplete them through the story, they invariably stumbled upon more food as they were about to starve to death. And it was food the rest of humanity had missed while they were starving to death, seemingly over five or ten years. Yet the man and the boy found it, which was all too convenient.I also struggled with what event would kill all life on Earth other than humans? I don’t doubt there could be a nuclear exchange, or a devastating meteorite strike, or some other terrible event. But what puzzled me was that there is no other life. Nothing. There were no rats, flys, crickets or cockroaches… These are forms of life that are amazingly resilient. But somehow there are humans wandering about but none of these little critters. Not a lot of humans, but enough that we run into one or two or a dirty gaggle once every twenty or thirty pages. But not a mouse in sight. Seemed odd.And after hundreds of pages and hundreds of miles on the road, and after most of the people they came across were cannibals that wanted them for dinner, at the end, after the man dies, and the boy sits beside him for three days on the verge of dying, who walks up? A well-armed father with a good (Christian?) wife and their two children who are about the same age as the boy. The man has delivered his son into the hands of someone who will care for him and raise him in a safe environment. Not are these just playmates, but there is potential to propagate and start humanity anew. There is hope.Of course, there is no food and the Earth is incapable of growing anything. There are no animals, no living plants, nothing. Are we left to believe that the boy has been saved? Or will he live in misery and despair until one way or the other, he also falls?This, in turn, leads to the novel’s strengths. Beyond the extraordinary writing and the stunningly bleak vision, beyond the smart way McCarthy never feels the need to explain why or how it all happened, he sets up unrelenting tension.Arguably the core story is that the man — the father — does not have the courage to kill his son and then himself to escape their hell. Where is the wife? The boy’s mother? She killed herself, we discover, before the story opened. And when the story opens, the man has a pistol with — you guessed it — two bullets. So we know from the start he has not yet found the courage to kill them both, and not long after we start our trip down the road, the man has to use one bullet.With only a single bullet left, his dilemma is even more profound: Should he use it to kill the boy in his sleep? Get it over with? If so, how would he kill himself? He could do it, but he no longer would have such a simple and easy means as a self-inflicted shot to the head after killing his son.In short, he can’t bring himself to kill his child, the child he loves so dearly, the child that trusts him so totally, which is shown over and over through the story in deeply emotional, compelling ways.Thus the tension mounts as we see the man, coughing his lungs out, sick and wounded, starving, limping toward his own death. We are left wondering until the end if he has the guts to kill his child and save him from what will befall him when taken by the cannibals.In the end, though McCarthy could horrify us, the man could not kill the child, his child, so he created an ending that (to this reader) was completely out of step with the rest of his dark vision.All said, the book is brilliant and I highly recommend it. The writing is uniquely McCarthy’s and the vision, the tension and the violence are also something few (if any) writer can match. I urge you to read The Road. McCarthy is a literary treasure and his works – gut wrenching though they are – should be experienced because they are so unlike the tediously similar books that frequent the bestseller lists. Just don’t think it is going to be a fun trip down the road.

⭐”She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”These words, near the end of Flanner O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” bounced around in my head as I made my way through Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. The man and son on the road live every day knowing that someone is there to shoot them, just around the bend, in the weeds across the ditch, or coming up behind them. Along with the constant threat, McCarthy’s spare prose builds a world in which trinkets and distractions have been stripped away. Neither color nor sunshine decks this landscape. The story confronts us with characters forced moment by moment to recognize what matters. “No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”The man and son in this predicament testify by their very existence that humans must live for others, else there’s no reason to live. And they show us that we cannot live without hope.World as We Know ItThe novel’s opening paragraph invokes Plato, Bunyan, Jonah, and Dante: “In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. . . .”Like Dante finding himself in a dark wood, McCarthy’s pilgrim will be led through hell to love not by Virgil but by the child. Like Bunyan’s Christian he shoulders his pack, which he will lose on the way to the celestial city. Like Jonah this man’s journey and experience are in themselves a message that calls Ninevites to repentance. Like Plato McCarthy seeks to deliver us from the illusion of the cave to know what is real (“forms” are invoked throughout, as is the image of “philosophers chained to a madhouse wall”).McCarthy’s pilgrim is loath to wake from dreams of the world as we know it, and McCarthy calls his audience to repent of discontented distraction and awaken to this world, the world of our dreams. At one point the man finds clean water, “water so sweet that he could smell it,” and he finds “Nothing in his memory anywhere of anything so good.” Savor your next drink of the same.Like Job’s wife, the man’s wife gave up (the line “Curse God and die” appears in the novel, followed shortly by the suggestive word “Blessed”). She asserted that those who had survived were “the walking dead in a horror film.” She claimed that there was no counterargument, that she hoped “for eternal nothingness.” But the counterargument McCarthy shows—not tells—is faith, hope, and self-giving love. These show the bankruptcy of hopeless, faithless existence that ends in nothingness. The man even pled that his wife not kill herself with the words, “For the love of God, woman. . .”These Three RemainMcCarthy’s words depict a world of “The frailty of everything revealed at last,” and the story he sets in that world shows that when all else is gone hope, faith, love, and life remain, that a man knows no greater love than to lay down his life for another, that life itself—the fact that we go on living—argues against despair. The birth of the boy was the man’s warrant for hope and faith against the devastated despair of his wife that a child had been born into such a world. The man and his wife responded in opposite ways: to her the child was a sorrow that tore out her heart, to him a miracle aglow with goodness: “They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn. A few nights later she gave birth in their bed by the light of a drycell lamp. Gloves meant for dishwashing. The improbable appearance of the small crown of the head. Streaked with blood and lank black hair. The rank meconium. Her cries meant nothing to him.”The alternatives are clear: death/life; despair/hope; selfishness/love. And in this book the good guys choose life, hope, and love. The good guys never give up. The good guys don’t break small promises because it leads to breaking big ones. The good guys carry the fire. “The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before battle. . . . There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all.”Sharp ContrastOther religious answers are also contrasted. At one point man and boy encounter a traveler, “a starved and threadbare buddha,” and this traveler regards the world and his experience as though nothing matters. When the man asks the buddha, “How would you know if you were the last man on earth?” The buddha says to the man:”It woudnt make any difference. When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.”The man replies: “I guess God would know it. Is that it?”Buddha: “There is no God.”The man: “No?”McCarthy condemns the buddha’s logic by presenting him contradicting himself with the retort: “There is no God and we are his prophets.”The man meets the buddha’s nonsensical assertion that he is the prophet of a God who does not exist with a counterargument for the buddha’s indifferent rejection of God: “I dont understand how you’re still alive. How do you eat?”The assertion “There is no God” is answered with the counter-assertion “you’re still alive.” The man seems to be suggesting that life itself is proof of God, evidence against meaninglessness.To the question “How do you eat?” the begging buddha replies: “People give you things.” With these words the buddha confesses that apart from the Christian virtue of charity he has no hope of life. The man has countered the buddha’s rejection of God with the fact of the buddha’s ongoing life, and the buddha himself has acknowledged that the generosity of others sustains his life. The wider narrative makes plain that generosity and charity spring only from faith in God, from hope that God will deliver and provide, and from love that mimics the very love of Christ, who gave his life that we might live.As the man and boy move on, the man asks if the buddha will thank the boy for giving him food, but the buddha refuses to do so. Christianity makes gratitude possible, but the buddha will not give the thanks he owes.This conversation with the buddha shows that love is distinctly Christian. The buddha has no category for love, goodness, or kindness, and the man’s suspicious interchange with him also shows how essential trust is to human communication. God is basic to human kindness and essential to human dignity. That is to say, apart from God there can be neither kindness nor dignity. The buddha will not even wish the man and the boy luck, and McCarthy seems thereby to intimate that a belief in God’s providence undergirds the kind of luck the man knows the buddha will not wish him. As they leave him, the man tells his son, “There’s not a lot of good news on the road” (175). The buddha has no gospel.The book opens with the man waking to grope for his son, earnest for reassurance that he is there, that they are safe. The book closes with the man going to sleep, choosing not to kill his son before he dies, clearly trusting that though he will not be awake to protect the boy, he can rest knowing that the boy will be safe. For this pilgrim, dying is an act of faith. They have not wandered in a cave but in a world without civilization, a world without forms. The forms are the world we now enjoy, if . . . if McCarthy’s Jonah can lead us to repentance by escorting us through the inferno, pilgrims making their way through the ruins of Vanity Fair. McCarthy seems to want us to know that the life we long for is the life we have.

⭐I knew very little about Cormac Mcarthy prior to reading this book. I’m going through a phase of consuming post apocalyptic stories and after much deliberation I thought I’d give it try. I’m so glad I wasn’t put off by some of the negative reviews. The Road is beautiful, thought provoking, compelling and life affirming. I hesitate to say it was a pleasure to read given the tone and subject matter but I recommend this book to anyone who is prepared to engage their brain and open their heart.McCarthy’s writing emotionally tied me to the characters without the usual writing conventions I’d expect, life doesn’t necessarily provide us with nice neat answers or resolutions to things especially in this case where nothing is normal and will never be so again. Why worry about fripperies when all human life has been cleaved down to the barest essentials, the novel’s style and prose reflects that in many ways. I was fully immersed in the story from the start, it’s not a long book, it was easy to follow the various exchanges and the story flowed beautifully. But be warned it’s emotionally draining and very bleak, it hurt my heart to read some of the passages, this truly frightening world McCarthy brought forth will live me for a long time.Forget the whys and wherefores of how the earth reached this hellish state, that’s honestly not important. The Road is basically a love story between a man and his son, McCarthy dedicates this book to his own little boy at the start and it’s abidingly clear that the primary focus for the reader should be on this relationship and its development, it positively burns through the pages. Man and boy are nameless (as are most of the characters we meet) but it didn’t lessen the power of his writing to convey the incredible depth of their love and reliance on each other.What we do learn is that there was an apocalyptic event around the time of the boy’s birth, its clear the effects were utterly devastating, life appears to have been extinguished save for a few pitiless souls left to walk the barren ash choked wasteland killing, stealing and scavenging for what’s left of any canned/preserved food or worse resorting to cannibalism. They trudge day after day through a world that appears stripped of life, of colour and a future for humankind. The boy knows nothing of the time before the tragedy, living in constant fear, cold and hunger for him is normality for the father it’s much worse, a desperate sadness at what has been lost that he is loathe to articulate, he remembers his old life in dreams and brief recollections and it’s from these that we get further insights into the past with his wife and family.The man is getting sicker by the day as they travel through the seemingly eternal grey, bleak, inhospitable, cold wasteland along a road. There is no sun, they are fighting constant starvation, the days are growing darker and colder as if heralding a nuclear style winter. They are moving south towards the coast as the father knows they can’t survive another winter where they’ve been living. It’s better for the father to have some goal to reach in order to hold on to his sanity and hope for the future and his son’s well being so they keep on the move. Hope, humanity, goodness and faith are key here it’s about “keeping the fire” as the father calls it, they are “the good guys” and his son demands reassurance of this fact at various stages and this sustains both of them despite the apparent desperateness of their situation.The father is deeply mistrusting of anyone they meet with his fearsome desire to protect his child who he looks up to almost as a vessel of goodness in this hellish world. When certain incidents happen the boy gets very upset and begins to fear they are no longer the good guys, this schism reflects more on the general fear of any parent desperately wanting to equip their child with the tools for survival and independence but fighting the need to control and fiercely protect. To compound the issue, the father realises he’s running out of time but equally the son carries the burden of knowing that soon he will be left alone to fend for himself, this forms an unbearable emotional strain between them.The tenderness the father expresses towards his son was deeply moving, despite the sparseness of the dialogue between them, the father is only still alive because of his son who is equally dependent on him. His fear and anguish over the boy at key moments almost had me in tears, the future is left opaque and undecided, it may be hopeless it may not, the reader is left to surmise for themselves many things and that’s how it should be. McCarthy’s gift in his writing is to keenly show in a very painful and raw way how loving someone can be and that the strength found in that is sometimes enough to carrying on.The rather stark, simple exchanges between father and son I found curiously moving and heartfelt and there are many touching little moments described. Also, the father is constantly tormented wondering if the time comes could he kill his child to spare him almost certain defilement. I can only imagine how much this story would resonate and especially if you’re a parent. “You have my whole heart”, the father says at one point, such simple honest beauty in that line!The Road shows us the strength of love and how in our darkest moments it can bind and hold people together against extreme circumstances that should crush the human spirit. Yet some if us choose to go on even if in the end the universe makes our existence appear almost meaningless. I can see why this book won acclaim.

⭐I really cannot understand how this book seems to get so many good reviews. In my mind, there is absolutely nothing to commend it. There is minmal plot and characterisation. But, worse than that, the structure and grammar are awful. I am assuming that the reason for a high proportion of “sentences” are not sentences at all, having no verb, was stylistic. The minmalist bleakness is probably meant to highlight the content. But, it just doesn’t work. Everything is very disjointed. I am used to reading “difficult” novels but this was barely readable and too pretentious for its own good. The only prize it should have won was the Turner Prize – for rubbish posing as art.

⭐I don’t normally write reviews, but this book is SO bad that I’m making an exception. Why would you even think to write a book like this! There’s no chapters, no names, no speech marks (in fact very little punctuation at all). There are countless made up words. All this and I’m only 60 pages in! I wanted to give it a chance due to all the five star reviews, but it’s just impossible to work out what the hell is going on, and I’m wasting my life trying to take it any further. I cannot understand how it has so many good reviews, I’m starting to think there’s something wrong with me!

⭐Depression Trigger warning:This is my first Cormac McCarthy novel and in all honesty it’ll probably be my last. At present I have no desire or intention of ever reading McCarthy’s work again. This isn’t a reflection of the quality of his writing, which is in fact, wonderfully creative. Staggeringly so.McCarthy employs a very simple, but wholly immersive narrative style in this book. His characters are nameless. Cormac gives them a gender and a rough age, but that’s about it. His sentence structure is stripped down to the bare bones, in that he discards conventional use of punctuation and grammar, in favour of a flowing, short structure, cut with the occasional longer, more poetic monologue from the narrator’s point of view.This approach is hugely effective. The short, sparse structure reflects and amplifies the bleakness of the world he has placed his poor characters into. The longer monologues are beautiful, insightful and heart-breaking at times; these moments shine a bright light onto the broken structure between, making the shadows they cast and struggles described in them all the more dark…. inescapable.Aside from the skill in the rudimentary narrative and prose, Cormac employs some of the most immersive, descriptive settings and conveyance of the complexities of emotions his characters suffer through I’ve ever experienced.This book is so wonderfully written, it is simply beautiful, the use of language to convey such hardship, such stark, stripped back humanity and beauty, but by God, it is bleak, and the most emotionally-draining piece of literature I’ve encountered.The world of The Road is so very bleak, so lacking in joy or comfort or hope. Reading this book was a trial for me, I didn’t want to continue, but its beauty and humanity and raw splendour dragged me along despite myself.If you are in any way prone to depression or periods of low mods, I would recommend avoiding this book, at least until happier times. It is a marvel, it is simply one of the most staggeringly gorgeous and horrifically desperate pieces of fiction I’ve read. I’ll never read this book again, but the gap it let in me will remain forever.

⭐There are lots of great reviews here giving you an idea of the content of The Road. I wanted to say something about literary forebearers. Not necessarily about books that McCarthy drew on (although maybe he did) but works that regardless remind me of The Road and which can make The Road even richer. Definitely there are spoilers.First, the extremes of deprivation and suffering remind me of Arthur Gordon Pym. It would involve too many spoilers to say precisely in what way, but I imagine a PhD could be written comparing the two works. Pym was a major influence on Moby Dick, one of McCarthy’s favourite books. And, indeed, Moby DIck and Pym are based on real events that very possibly had a direct effect on The Road.Second, the relationship between the boy and the father, left alone in this desolate setting, remind me of Waiting for Godot. The mostly two person dialogue, in a sparsely populated wasteland, destroyed by something unspecified, is very Beckettian. The relationship is different, of course, and the absurdity of Godot is not here.Third — and is it possible that McCarthy is sometimes thinking of Beckett — of Molloy, especially the second half which concerns a father and son wondering alone in a pretty forbidding world and suffering considerable deprivation. In fact, I thought of Molloy almost from the outset.Of course, Robinson Crusoe is important, especially in the discovery of the boat. But this is no Robinsonade. I really enjoyed, however, the detailed account of the actions the man takes. McCarthy has an extremely practical bent in all his novels. He loves how things are made and their materials, and always he appears to know what he is talking about. Remember the detailed descriptions of firearms and the night sky in Blood Meridian? This focus on the concrete world is very rare, and perhaps not as common as it should be even in literary fiction.I also think there is a bit of I am Legend here. Of course so many modern zombie movies follow from Matheson’s book, and the scavenging for resources from a ravaged world is not unique to Matheson’s book, but the ending of the two books are quite similar. There is also an echo of A Canticle for Leibowitz. The Road is a very powerful book. Its the McCarthy book likely to appeal to the widest audience (perhaps excepting No Country For Old Men), but it is not a pop bestseller. It is a significant piece of literature well worth rereading.

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