Beyond Bonding

Is life truly about where you’re going, or the process itself? As I read The Road, my reading objective was to know what was going to happen to the boy and his father. Were they going to survive? Were they going to find other people? Where would they end up? As I finished the book, with the father’s tragic death, I reflected on my original reading objective, and I concluded that the story itself isn’t what makes McCarthy’s book interesting, it is captivating because of the road it creates as we read, for the path we must travel on. The author is able to give us some insights about traveling, appropriate for this quest: “Maybe you should always be on the lookout. If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it” (McCarthy, 77). I find it interesting how McCarthy captures what both characters are thinking and feeling without leaving behind the human side to the story, the idea of struggling to survive with another human being. The same way the father tried to maintain a good relationship with his son, trying to cheer him up and answering all of the questions he asked, McCarthy does the same with us, giving us the necessary information to continue on this journey, to understand the suffering, to imagine what it would be like to experience these extremes and wonder how we would cope.

The way McCarthy makes the reader view his story, ensures we are emotionally bonded with the characters. The author exploits this bond in order to make everything that the characters think or feel, affect us tremendously. As seen in the father’s reflection when he boards the ship and looks for supplies, hope was something he was running out of: “It occurred to him that he took this windfall in a fashion dangerously close to matter of fact but still he said what he had said before. That good luck might be no such thing. There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead” (McCarthy, 119). The idea of envying the dead, of hoping to loose our lives in order to be satisfied, is extremely tragic. It seems unnatural to envy something most individuals run away from, but it seems reasonable after loosing all faith, of not being able to even believe in luck. This line of thought makes his story verisimilar, while appreciating what the reader must be feeling with every word.

The concept of a road, of a journey or quest, implies in its own definition it must have a beginning and an end, in the sort of way a book has one. The narrator of The Road is able to warn us of this end when he describes how “they camped and when he lay down he knew that he could go no further and that this was the place where he would die” (McCarthy, 144). The road we share with the characters, the road to bonding with our surroundings, be it human or other forms of existence, transforms itself into a rule of living as the journey comes to an end, a rule of existence, of creating a relationship with that which we care about, with that which surrounds us. McCarthy gives us his concept of living, of taking the journey, one that transcends death due to the bond we create with our surroundings.