The Road

The post-apocalpytic condition both man and boy face in The Road is not so much a futuristic statement as it is the condition we face in the present and the condition that has always been since man was born. In a world stripped to its bare essentials we find that the raison d’être of man is really just to protect and bring his children up, which the protagonist single-mindedly does. Beyond that there is nothing, as he sees before he dies:

The road crosses a dried slough where pipes of ice stood out of the frozen mud like formations in a cave. The remains of an old fire by the side of the road. Beyond that a long concrete causeway. A dead swamp. Dead trees standing out of the gray water trailing gray and relic hegmoss. The silky spills of ash against the curbing. He stood leaning on the gritty concrete rail. Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.

The story is powerful in its imagery and poetic prose, a style similar to that in Blood Meridian-- only this time it is drenched in ash not blood, tepid bleakness not visceral violence. The critical difference is that the child survives, an ending which, I feel, is weak because it destroys the totality of nothingness. At the same time, though, it suggests a continuity that is not only meaningless but hopeless, for, trapped in an ashen world, he might as well been dead.