Davis Editing

In reviewing a Pulitzer Prize–winning book (the winner in fiction in 2007), I’m almost certain that whatever I say about it has already been said. Despite its popularity, I knew very little about the book before I started reading. I knew it was about a father and son traveling down the road in a post-apocalyptic world. What I didn’t know or expect was that it is also, maybe even primarily, about God. And the two topics are not all that separate. (I’ll add here that I’d love to hear anyone else’s reading of the book, especially its theology.)

The question of God is there from the beginning. “He [the father] raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.” The Road is a Job-like fable, but here the character curses God unlike the biblical figure. Yet this curse does not seem ultimate: it is a voiced protest against reality, but there remains genuine searching faith that continues to the end.

Over and over the father wonders, asks, questions: Is God the ground of being, or is the ground of being a pitiless, dark earth (the “dead world”) with nothing left but an inhuman remnant of humanity? God’s seeming absence reaches fever pitch toward the end of the book, encapsulated in sentence fragments: “The salitter drying from the earth.” “The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.” (Salitter is “the essence of God,” a word McCarthy purportedly borrows—whether it’s true I don’t know—from Jakob Böhme, German philosopher-mystic born in 1575.)

The cold, desolate world and the circumstances of the father and son—hunger, exhaustion, sickness, near-constant fear of violence and death—tilt toward an assured godlessness. But not always, not completely. There is a light in this darkness and it is the child, who is an anomaly. “When I saw that boy I thought that I had died,” an old man says. The father replies, “You thought he was an angel?” The man responds, “I didnt know what he was. I never thought to see a child again. I didnt know that would happen.” To which the father says, “What if I said that he’s a god?”

This isn’t a revelation midway through the book, though. It’s there even at the beginning: “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” The question of God is closely connected to the identity of the boy.

The boy’s divine nature manifests at the end, where biblical imagery piles up: he is “glowing in the waste like a tabernacle.” Is the boy (a) God? The answer seems to be yes. He is a messiah, surrounded by light, foretold by prophets: “He [the father] lay watching the boy at the fire. He wanted to be able to see. Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”

Light and fire—set against physical and psychological darkness—are a constant theme in the book. The father encourages the boy along the way, telling him they are “carrying the fire,” a phrase we read multiple times. It is literal fire—they make fires to stay warm and survive—and it is more than that. When, at the end, the boy voices the question that’s been shifting under the surface of the book like the earth’s plates, the father answers with certainty. “Is it real? The fire?” the boy asks. “Yes it is. . . . It’s inside you.”

What is this fire, this ground of being, if darkness and death aren’t the telos of everything? In the final pages we’re given a somewhat weak answer at first: luck. “You’ll be okay. You’re going to be lucky.” The father and his boy have been lucky before—finding caches of food, for example—and luck will come again. To me, this was not a satisfying answer, and thankfully something stronger follows: goodness. “Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”

Further attestation and explanation of God’s presence in the world comes in the penultimate paragraph. The boy is reassured that “the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.”

The last paragraph, however, is cryptic and puzzling. This book, as should be obvious by now, is a theodicy: How do we make sense of the world in light of God, and vice versa? And will the world be made right in the end? McCarthy (if it’s fair to ascribe the views to the author) has confirmed that the ground of being is goodness, not evil, but he leaves the latter question open. Actually, the answer seems to be no. We read of “the world in its becoming,” of “a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.”

What do we make of this? Perhaps it is true that the old world—the world of The Road and our own world—cannot be “put back.” And perhaps that doesn’t preclude a new world, or a world renewed, where things again are right.