Response to: “Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”

Schaub asserts in his essay that The Road that in a post-apocalyptic world, the lack or even absence of religion forces the few people who are left to have to create some sort of religion or belief to live for. I fully support Schaub’s claim that the idea of faith being grown out of something horrible was McCarthy’s intention to get across to a reader. McCarthy often drives this point by the many references to Genesis and the creation of man to the journey the man and boy are on in The Road. With literally nothing to live for, it is only natural to create things to live for—in the case of The Road, Cormac McCarthy crafts the boy to allude to the idea that he may be “the chosen” one. That chosen ‘higher power’ to prevent their planet from inexistence—“When we’re all gone at last then there’ll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too” (McCarthy 146). The journey that the boy and man are traveling to survive can be paralleled to the story of Genesis. As Schaub discussed, “these allusions [in The Road to religion] constitute an echo not only of literary but also of human history, within which the artist sought to explain the ways of god to men” as Genesis for some people today explains how god/God created man (Schaub 155). Even the obvious that the man is never named, as the man in Genesis is never named shows McCarthy’s ability to allude to Genesis in his novel. As Schaub recognizes, the opening lines to The Road are almost identical to the passage in Genesis “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (002:007). Even the idea (which may be a stretch on my part) but that the boy outlived the man—to spread their ‘good news’ or what they called “the fire” as Jesus in the Catholic Faith is considered to have been crucified as atonement for the sin of all man. Did the father in the novel play the same role of dieing for another to live? As I believe someone (I apologize I don’t recall the exact person) but I know someone in class today suggested that the father’s ‘fire’ was extinguished by the end of the novel, but the boy’s was not so that may be why the boy was able to live. He could continue to carry the fire. Also, often in depictions of Jesus he has a heart filled with fire:

So when the father states to the boy at the closing of the novel, “You don’t know what might be down the road. You must carry the fire” he means he must carry that fire in his heart, as a higher power would, to spread good news, to spread faith (Schaub 163). In this same depiction of Christ above you can obviously see the light that radiates from him. That is the same idea when the father is dying and he recognizes, “when he moved the light moved with him” (277). The father could see that his son attained that same aura of light as does Jesus in many drawings.

Now I have somewhat strayed from my original thesis and what I am supporting—I feel that I may have been somewhat off, it is not the boy creating faith, it is the boy living and acting out that faith where the father is recognizing it. The father can recognize that his son may in fact be ‘holy’ because he lived before the time of the apocalypse. The father knew what it meant to be a “body of God” whereas the son’s life and all that he could remember was in the post-apocalyptic world. This connects back to the idea in class that ignorance can be directly connected to goodness and purity—the boy was acting his life in the manner “goodness can persist in the face of violence” without truly understanding that his goodness was in the face of such a horrible world (Schaub 158). The boy did not know what a world without seas of ash, barren landscape, and constant cold was like. That isn’t to say that the boy thought the world he lived in was all hunky dory—he just didn’t know the extent of how horrible his planet had become.

Returning to the father’s death as I discussed above, in the final moments when he is speaking to his son and revealing to the boy that he will be leaving him alone, he reassures him by stating, “You can talk to men and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see. ... You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you’ll hear me. You have to practice. Just don’t give up” (Schaub 163/McCarthy 278-79). Now it may just be the father’s paternal instincts that he told the son he could ‘talk to him’ to make the boy not feel alone, but I have a lingering feeling that McCarthy intended that dialogue to show the transcendence of religion even amidst death—if the father and son could ‘talk’ to one another even after the father had passed, doesn’t that somehow suggest that the father is going to an afterlife and then further suggesting that the two of them were creating a religion or faith to live for?

I believe that Schaub’s intent in his essay was to highlight how (as Molly and Chelsea spoke about in class) religion can exist without emulation—of course the world in The Road had no churches left, no bibles, no hymns, or organized prayer, but even amidst death glimpses of religion can still be recognized. As Ely asked the man “Maybe he believes in God” (McCarthy 173). I believe that Schaub asserts that it wasn’t that the boy believed in a god per say, he was acting as a God as the boy had “values that transcend mere survival, that are fundamental to the boy’s character” (Schaub 162). The boy never really explained fully his reasoning behind wanting to help all of the sick and suffering and why it pained him so that he could not. Schaub makes me think that the boy never explained this desire to want to help people because the boy never felt like he had to, it was a desire, a passion or “fire” that burned in his heart that he could not let go of, whether it meant living or dying to fulfill this desire to help people, the boy would do it. The boy would save another man’s life before his own in a heartbeat; that in itself sounds holy to me.