Doomsday

Where do I begin? “It was a dark and stormy night….It was another dark and stormy night…The dark and stormy night eventually gave way to the dull glow of the grey sun, shining in the grey sky, refracting pathetic streams of light through the ash strewn air…”  I feel so warm and fuzzy inside.

“The Road” offered little recourse in a cold, grey and overall hopeless world. Before reading the book I glanced at the back and read some of the reviews. I initially believed that this was a story of hope in the face of  extreme desperation and adversity. Unfortunately, after going through the first 200 pages I found myself cold, shivering, hungry and in a somewhat gloomy state. This book actually reminded me of the ordeal I went through reading “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. As Ivan went through his day wrapping his frostbitten hands in scraps of cloth, I found my hands becoming colder and my mind wandering further and further into the depths of a Soviet gulag. The major difference in reading this text was knowing that there was life and hope after the gulag and the other devastations brought with Stalinism. In “The Road” the reader is left in a a state of suspense. The reader is completely unaware of  what exactly happened to the world. We are only given a peek into the devastation and the extent of its effects. McCarthy’s approach left me with very little to look forward to. Why would anyone do this to me? Yes I am taking this very personally. Why bring the reader to such a despairing state? This is a place absent of decency, morals and to an extent  basic humanity. I could only see humanity through the small child as his father ravaged by the burden of living slipped further into his “animal”instinct to survive. I guess in a way the author presents the apocalypse as a the end of society, law, ethics and values. Everyone is left to wander shiftlessly through the grey shroud surrounding them nothing to lose and nothing to look forward to. Not to get all philosophical but is this what Hobbes may have imagined when he described man in the state of nature? Life for the man and his child and whoever else managed to survive truly was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” I would love to believe in the resilience of the human character but McCarthy and Hobbes are an eerie reminder that without the strappings and conventions of modern society and on a very basic level civilization, we are all quite pathetic. I am not entirely sure if we should thank them for this sobering reminder or sweep their dismal rants under to be remembered only in an academic context such as now.

I wonder how this would translate onto film?