The Road We Walk

Have you ever pondered, if nearly everything joyful about life came to an end, what would this earth be like, and what would there be to keep you living? 

That’s one of the many questions posed by McCarthy in this Pulitzer Prize winning fiction account of a post-nuclear America, The Road. Father and son drift across the ash-covered, burnt landscape, determined to get to the coast, fighting daily to survive in a sort of Mad Max-esque life. 

With brilliant literary finesse, McCarthy is able to find the nerve of human hope/despair and strike it, page after page, in such a way that makes you question what it is you keep living for. If all that was left was a burnt-to-nothing world—no grocery stores, no established government, no cities, no culture—what would drive you? What would keep you scavenging for food, fighting to stay alive, running from bandits, each and every moment you were alive? 

What I think McCarthy does so well is force us to face a world where everything we find joy in is destroyed, which makes us question, at bottom, if our hope is only as good as the things we hope in, should we reconsider the objects in which we place such confidence for our happiness?  

I’m not really sure that McCarthy gives the answer in the book. You have to decide for yourself. To be honest, I think he tries to make it about the quality of relationship between the father and son, which is genuinely heart-warming but, in the end, that dies too. His attempt, however, at pointing us to meaning ends without a bang—I think the book is meant more to draw out questions rather than direct us to answers. If there is an answer, it’s something about one last shred of human goodness which is pretty murky in the book. 

But I think the book raises questions that are worth our time, questions about hope and life. The truth is, our posh lives are at any given moment only a hair’s breadth away from being destroyed and we lose everything, either in nuclear destruction or death. Jesus said  ”what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.” (Lk 21:6). 

Where is your hope? If it’s ultimately in something on this earth, then it’s going to die, to be destroyed, and what will you hope for in that day? 

I will make one suggestion: hope in God, for he is the everlasting God, a happiness that endures forever, a never-ending fountain of delights. Unlike anything on this earth, he never fades away. Yes, hope in the eternal God, who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. (Isa 40:30-31; Ps 16:11; 2 Cor 4:18). 

“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Cor 4:18).