Parenting A New Culture

There is a moral obligation with parenting, at least that is what good parents can agree upon. The Road exploits this natural feeling, this bond between father and son, giving us an interesting perception of what an individual will do for his breed. The narrator describes how “He wrapped him in his own parka and wrapped him in the blanket and sat holding him, rocking back and forth. A single round left in the revolver. You will not face the truth. You will not” (McCarthy, 35). The difficulties of this journey for survival would easily destroy most individual’s hopes and strength for survival, at least mine. One could ask survive for what? But McCarthy uses the moral obligation involved with parenting to make this verisimilar, having these descriptions of an individual trying to have faith and continue in the journey, to not give up, to try not to face the truth.

The complexity of creating another world, one which would come after that which we call ours, involves creating new customs, as the protagonist states: “All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” (McCarthy, 38). It is common knowledge that one needs a culture, one must have cultural identity in order to exist, making it an urgent necessity in these survivors to create their own, their unique form of living, of coping with this new reality. The details involved in this writing are difficult to imagine, the amounts of work needed to make a reader feel that he or she is living this story, understanding what is happening. The cultural detail is just one of them but without it the whole novel’s feasibility is probably threatened.

McCarthy continues elaborating this world’s culture in unique and interesting ways as seen in the narrator’s description of the flute the father gives his son: “After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin” (McCarthy, 39). The author plays with the perception one must take of each event, as seen by the opposites presented in these sentences, the one that considers this the new music of the new world and the one that considers it the remaining of the previous human existence. The existence of such a debate is given to the text by the human element in the text, the parenting of this new culture.