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#CW: rape mention #spoilers for The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Context: I was going on about a book in my journal and realized this section could work as a blog post :3
‘The Road really kicked my ass, in part because of the run on sentances that made my eyes glass over, and then because of the overwhelming sadness that came from reading further. The story is about a man and his son trying their best to survive an apocalypse, encountering dangers such as cannnibals but mostly natural dangers such as starvation, freezing weather etc. The main conflict is how the man and his son’s relationship develop mostly for the worst. At the beginning the boy still has his childish naivety and- well immaturity is an apt term, but not with the intent to insult him. He’s a child and his father does his best to preserve what innocence there is left.
Unfortunately over time and due to difficult decisions they have had to make, the boy grows more and more cynical. While I personally can’t fault the father for most of his brutally practical actions it doesn’t lessen the heartbreak as the boy begs to show mercy to strangers, expressing his doubts that they really are the ‘good guys’ as his father claims. It is so much worse to try listening from the audio book, I had to give up on that and just read it myself.
Despite the hurt from moments like these or because of it honestly I think the moral conflict made for a really tense reading that made me really invested. We get flashbacks to what happened to the man’s wife, who isn’t present.
Everything fell apart with an argument over the apocalypse- the boy is very young and the. Woman have come to realize that the task of not only living, but caring for a complete dependent is something she can no longer do. She points out that it’s only a matter of time before the family is found by one of the roaming packs of cannibals, subsequently being raped and murdered. At this point she believes the best course of action is to use on of their bullets to commit suicide and mentions if it weren’t for the man she’d take her child with. It’s horrible thing to say and the man pleads with her but the difficult part of this is how, as I read this I couldn’t stop thinking that as brutal as her logic is, it’s an understandable conclusion to reach within this context.
She then proceeds to go through with her plan and leaves the man to care for the boy. Something that the man ruminates on when she accuses him of not being able to do the hard thing- mercy killing their son to prevent the worst from happening. The two come very close to death, and when they’re just at the edge of it he questions if he can bring himself to end things himself, ultimately realizing as he dies that he never could have killed his son.
It was such a heavy read, I gotta read something more lighthearted next. Still I appreciated the way the author doesn’t shy away from making the reader feel the bleakness, leaving them to consider uncomfortable questions.’