The Road Summary

The Road Summary

The Road By Cormac McCarthy

Setting

The novel takes place in the South as The Man and The Boy travel south and east toward the coast.

Main Characters

The Man – Is the boy’s father, his papa, and believes that he has been entrusted by God to keep the boy safe and to protect him from harm and the evils in the world.

The Boy – goes unnamed throughout the novel. The boy is the only source of light in his father’s life.

The Woman – the woman is the man’s wife and the boy’s mother.

Man Struck by Lightning – the man and the boy come upon him on the road as he was struck by lightning.

The Bad Man from the Truck – the first human being, other than the boy, that the father speaks to in over a year.

Road agents, the Bad Guys – road agents and members of communes are the bad guys, and the man and boy fear and must watch out for them.

Ely – is an old man that the man and boy come upon in the road.

Thief – an outcast from one of the communes, steals all that the man and boy own while they are away walking on the beach.

The Man with the Bow and Arrow – shoots the boy's father with an arrow as they walk through town.

The Man with a Shotgun – he finds the boy after his father dies.

The Little Boy – the boy says that he sees another little boy and is deeply concerned for him.

The Woman, Wife of the man with a Shotgun

The little girl – mentioned by the man with a shotgun.

Plot Summary

The novel begins with the man and the boy in the woods, the boy asleep, as the two of them are making their journey along their journey along the road. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world, date, and place unnamed, though the reader can assume it's somewhere in what was the United Stated because the man tells the boy that they are walking the "state roads.”

The first few pages of the novel situate us in the landscape: ash, isolation, and a long road to travel. The novel alternates between two settings: the road and excursions away from the road into houses or other possible food mother lodes. Although the Boy and The Man suffer from exposure to cold and lack of food, they don’t encounter too much danger early on.

A quarter way into the book, a group of bad guys wakes up The Man one morning. The Man tries to get The Boy and himself out of view but they run into one of these "bad guys” who has wandered off from the main group. The "bad guy” tries to take The Boy hostage but The Man, in a sequence straight out of an action movie, shoots the "bad guy” in the forehead. They escape unharmed, but a little rattled.

Soon after another really frightening event happens. The Boy and The Man have run out of food and need to find more supplies. They start poking around the kind of house they normally would not explore but there are too many telltale signs of occupation. They end up seeing something horrifying: a basement full of human captives being held as livestock. Whoever lives in this house is eating their way through a store of human beings locked up in the cellar. The Man and The Boy hightail it out of there and almost get caught by the gang that lives in the house.

The Man and The Boy have a string of good luck. Granted, their good luck is punctuated by near-starvation and sickness, but they do not have any run-ins with evil people. Right when they are on the verge of starvation, The Man finds an apple orchard and a well, which keeps them fed and watered for a while.

However, as is always the case, their food stores run out soon enough and they find themselves hungry once again. This leads to a major discovery: a bomb shelter full of canned goods and supplies. They spend a couple of days here eating to their heart's content. But because they are sitting ducks if anyone happens along, they leave the shelter. The food lasts for a while but once again it runs out and they start starving. The Man gets really sick and feverish. The Boy spots a house off in the distance where they stay for a little while before leaving.

All along, they are traveling south and east. The man thinks that if they reach the coast, they will be alright. It is not an easy journey as they have to cross the mountains. When they get to the coast, they are disappointed. However, The Man locates a wrecked ship a few hundred yards out. The ship is full of food and useful stuff, like a flare gun and batteries. They eat well for a while.

Unfortunately, the boy gets sick. The Man is beside himself trying to keep the Boy alive. He finally recovers, but then more bad stuff happens. Someone tries to steal their cart and supplies and they are forced to chase the thief down. They get their food back, but it is a big scare, and The Boy is not too happy with how The Man treats the thief. 

They head farther south through a coastal city, and more bad luck strikes. Someone shoots an arrow from a window and hits The Man in the leg causing a nasty wound. They travel inland. Finally, in a pine forest, The Man can’t go any farther. Not sure if he dies from the arrow wound or the respiratory illness, he’s had all along, but he dies with The Boy beside him. Much of the book has been leading up to this event. The Man’s interactions with The Boy can be seen as an attempt to prepare The Boy to live in the world on his own.

Almost immediately, though, another family appears on the road, and they take in the Boy. This comes as a surprise as nowhere else in the novel does The Man and Boy meet any good, upstanding travelers. The book ends on a note of hope: perhaps these small enclaves of compassionate people can survive and eventually rebuild a tolerable world.

Themes

Violence

McCarthy portrays a post-apocalyptic landscape where the scarcity of resources has driven few survivors to murder, thievery, and even cannibalism. The more sympathetic characters attempt common decency, avoiding brutality as much as possible.

Love

In the midst of all the violence and gore in The Road, there is a beautiful love story at its center. We get to experience a tender story about a father and son. In the book, love survives in the midst of a chaotic, barbaric world. McCarthy also sets some pretty high standards for love. These characters care for each other with a level of self-sacrifice and compassion that we usually only see in saints.

Mortality

Death is a constant in The Road. Its thorough inclusion in the novel almost gives it the status of a character. The constant threat of death, from starvation, exposure, illness, or murder, also makes the everyday stuff in the book much richer than it otherwise would be. Simple actions like eating, finding clean water, or exchange a few kind words with another human being suddenly seem quite extraordinary.

Spirituality

The Road is a fundamentally agnostic novel, meaning that some characters believe in God while others seriously doubt God’s existence. The protagonist of the novel flips back and forth on whether he believes in God. McCarthy himself does not really weigh in.

Isolation

The isolation of the two main characters in The Road is pretty extreme. God has seemingly abandoned them, and they have totally lost contact with other decent people. For The Man, isolation compounds into something resembling alienation. His memory of a previous and better world makes the one he’s in seem all the more desolate. However, McCarthy tempers the isolation of his novel with an endearing father-son relationship.

Good Vs. Evil

In the novel, there are actual groups of "good guys” and "bad guys,” which is somewhat surprising for a work of literary fiction. In the wake of a world catastrophe, though, goodness has all but disappeared. The protagonists sometimes use private language to describe goodness (i.e., "carrying the fire”), but goodness more or less means not eating other human beings and not brutalizing those weaker than you. It may not seem like much, but the universe of the novel is so bleak and terrible that even small acts of kindness are seen as heroic.

Memory and the Past

Memory is something of a double-edged sword in The Road. The protagonist wants to remember the past, but when he does, he has trouble focusing on survival. In addition, by remembering the past, the protagonist feels he’s altering his memories of it, so he tries not to recall too much in order to preserve it. However, the setting of the novel is terrible such that the protagonist really needs the sustenance of the past. The novel presents memory and the past as an unavoidable conundrum: even though memory connects the protagonist to beauty and goodness, it only reminds him that those things no longer exist.

Strength and Skill

The Road exalts the resourcefulness of its protagonist. Resourcefulness becomes an enshrined skill, partly because it ensures the survival of loved ones. Resourcefulness also allows the protagonist to connect with a disappearing world. Fixing a stove or shopping cart is not only necessary for his survival but also necessary to preserve a few man-made artifacts that might quickly vanish.

Versions of Reality

Most of the "versions of reality” in the Road are dreams. McCarthy includes a hallucination or two and briefly makes fun of happy stories, but he mainly focuses on the dreams of his characters. Good dreams act like mirages in the novel, drawing the characters away from their harsh reality. Nightmares, on the other hand, reflect the terror they face daily. It's almost as if the unconscious in the novel no longer harbors illicit desires. All the terrible things people could do are already being done. Rather, the unconscious harbors suppressed happy memories, which the protagonist, perhaps correctly, calls distracting.

Compassion and Forgiveness

The world Cormac McCarthy describes in The Road is a cruel place. Compassion in this dog-eat-dog (or man-eat-man) world seems all the more precious. Granted, McCarthy mostly associates compassion with the novel's child protagonist. This taints the portrayal of compassion a little, aligning it more with naiveté than goodness. It's hard to maintain such a cynical view, though: just when you think you've read the grossest thing possible, a character will do something really, really kind. In this way, perhaps, the novel defines compassion pretty well: something not required but given.