I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and then I stepped outside to the 80 degree April day and stood on the cement slab of my apartment building’s porch. Those who’ve read it know that book is black and white and gray, so the effect of green Spring was overwhelming. It’s strange to have spent so much time with a survival story, reading about people beating odds stacked high against them. It’s a good story for people who feel that way and I guess I do sometimes. Wanting to be a writer makes life feel like that, maybe wanting to be anything during this economic plunge makes life feel like a survival story. I suppose the odds are stacked against us all. But read that book and then go stand outside.
Everything is alive today and loud–the birds call, the bees are fat and they make noise among the flowers. Neighbors are rustling upstairs, dogs running back and forth across the floorboards. The refrigerators are humming. Cars rushing past. Someone’s playing bass.
Read that book about everything dead or dying and then realize everything is alive and will be.
Read that book because it has a great last line.
That novel is quite a contrast to Spring– which has arrived here as well, except maybe it’s actually Summer. It has been HOT.
Do you read _The Road_ as about beating the odds? It seems far bleaker than that to me. That’s what was so horrific about it– it’s essentially hopeless.
Can you imagine getting ourselves into such a mess that we no longer have Spring? I was enjoying my walk to church today, and thinking just about how wonderful seasons are. How do they always happen?
I did read it as a story of perseverance. The last thing we know about the survivors is that “they lived” in the glens. It’s not like he wipes everyone out. I definitely didn’t read it as hopeless but maybe that was a choice. I don’t usually see anything as hopeless.
I guess it depends on how the reader interprets the “thing” that “cant be made right again” in the last paragraph of the book. I saw it as the old life which the people can’t return to. But then he mentions something deeper than that in the last line; that’s what blew me away.
I hadn’t had spring in two years. I’m still deciding how I feel about four seasons vs. the Thailand hot three. Both have their perks, I suppose.
It’s been a while since I read it, and admittedly I’m probably biased by a conversation I heard about it before I read it, where my OU prof who writes on McCarthy insisted that the ending is not hopeful. I definitely didn’t feel like any victory was achieved in the end, though. Maybe that single story line was resolved somewhat, but there’s still this nuclear winter with roving bands of cannibals thing going on.
Is it possible for a story of perseverance to not be about beating the odds? Actually, I kind of dislike the whole concept of “beating the odds”– I mean, odds seems so chancy. But it seems possible to persevere and still lose, somehow– and maybe that’s where hope and faith come in.
I’m thinking about how you don’t usually see anything as hopeless, and I’m wondering about ethics of projecting things like our own hope onto a story. In other words, is it good for we who have hope to find that hope in anything, or does it do some violence to insist on hope in a place where it has been deliberately left out? I’m saying “hope” but I’m referring to anything like it, really. I’m really not sure how I feel about it– on the one hand it feels like an author’s intent argument, and I don’t much care what an author intends. But I am also committed to accurate interpretation (or if not accurate, then the closest we can approximate to accurate), and so I wouldn’t want to wrest anything to fit my ‘druthers. I dunno.
Eh, I don’t know. As a writer, I guess I just want people to read what I put out there. I don’t care much, at least at this point, whether people read my stories as more bleak or hopeful than I intended. I guess partly what I was thinking in writing this post was that reading this gray/dark/bleak book does make me more acute to how not bleak the world is outside (especially on a day like today). That’s why I wrote “and then realize that everything is alive…” We don’t live in the world of that book, which is cause for us to have joy right now. And if there is hope in that book it has to do with the survival, not the world that offers little hope around them. I hope that makes sense.
I also saw the ending as hopeful. Not only do good guys exist, but they had been secretly watching all along. The father didn’t know why going to the coast would be any better but he felt he had to go there, and it turned out to be the one thing that would keep his son alive.
I think this discussion makes me come up thinking the book is great. I wasn’t sure for a while but now it’s really buzzing in my head. Especially the way the boy acts as a moral force. Even when it is explained to him that it’s necessary to do a-moral things in order to survive, he can’t accept it.
Oh, I like that about the boy, too. But more than anything I liked the language. Even the goriest and most frightening parts were beautiful.