When the world we know is gone, what else is there to live for? This is a question that has been tirelessly touched upon in this class in relation to the other stories we’ve read/seen so far. For the other stories, there has always been a glimmer of hope for a better future, whether it is through women’s fertility, heavenly immortality, or even peace on Earth. For McCarthy’s The Road, I found myself troubled with the fact that I couldn’t initially find a clear reason for the man’s desperate want to survive.

We learn from the man’s memories and his conversations with his son that the boy was born into this post-apocalyptic world, knowing nothing of the world prior. His father shares little information about it, not even disclosing the cause of the apocalypse. From the first page however, we are able to clearly see the barren, deserted and altogether bleak landscape of this new world. Food is scarce and temperatures are frigid. Though the man always speaks of “moving forward,” where exactly are they headed? All we know is that if their future collides with the cannibals (or the “bad people” as the man calls them), the man instructs his son to kill himself with the gun. “You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point it up. Do it quick and hard.” All I could think was that if I were to find myself in a place like this, I would find it very hard to want to continue living, especially with the threat of being eaten by cannibals. Yet it was right after their all too close encounter with the cannibals that made me realize what was keeping the man alive- his love for his son. Human compassion is a powerful motive that can keep anyone in the fight for survival during trying times. This man does not want to deprive his son of life, even in the awful world in which they live. As long as his love exists, life was worth living.

Yet what still troubled me was his coldness to the rest of the world. Granted, there are people that they should not trust or interact with, such as the cannibals. But the little boy they found was probably as much like the man and the son as could be, innocently wandering the road in hopes of survival. While the son yearns to help this other boy, the father urges him to leave him behind and continue forth. Though at first the cannibals seemed to represent the recurring “zombie” theme of post-apocalyptic tales, the man soon seemed to fit that category for me as well. In his desperate attempt to keep him and his son alive, he has lost touch with humanity. He became a zombie without humane feelings for anyone but his son. This realization brought me back to another bleak hope for the future. If the fight for individual (and familial) survival in a post-apocalyptic world can reduce us to zombies, is there any hope in living in it?