Have you ever started a project incorrectly, so you then dread everything that follows? For example:

• On the first day of a new school, kids teased you, making you feel like you could never go back.
• Or you ordered “El Diablo Wings” as an appetizer, and then you couldn’t taste the actual meal that followed.
• Or you started watching The Godfather series with the unwatchable Part III.

This sort of describes my relationship to Cormac McCarthy books. I was first introduced to him through our Siblings’ Book Club, when someone recommended Blood Meridian. That book was the most vile, gratuitous “masterpiece” I’ve ever laid eyes on. I read enough to be able to review it honestly (see the link), and my scathing review is one of my most-read, most-despised posts on this site. No apologies.

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The Road and Blood Meridian: A Brief Comparison

Oh, how I should have begun with The Road instead! Not that this book provides any context for Blood Meridian, but it would at least have allowed me to enter that cowboy tale with a modicum of respect for McCarthy.

The Road contains similar authorial quirks as Blood Meridian—missing quotation marks, poor punctuation choices, and episodes that seem rambling—and yet in this book, I not only understood these quirks, I also appreciated them. Even the occasional paragraph that reeks of poetry made sense to me this time around.

This book, like Blood Meridian, contains violence. Unlike Blood Meridian, however, this violence is neither wonton nor gratuitous, and it makes sense in its context. The mild vulgarity, as well, is expected in a book such as this, but is not overbearing and fits the story well.

Missing from this book are character names and chapter divisions. It’s just one long description of the Man and his Boy, episodic yet continuous as one gray day follows another. This monotony of cold, gray mornings might sound boring, but McCarthy’s skill in storytelling makes it so you simply don’t want to put the book down. For a taste of what I mean, take this paragraph for example:

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle. (273)

Lessons from The Road

Memory

When all distractions of the “normal” world flee, one’s attention remains on a few things only: food, rest, movement, shelter, safety. These plodding steps forward into the dark unknown, however, also grant the survivors more time for reflection. This passage was especially poignant, and it’s as true today as it would be post-apocalypse:

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.

You forget some things, don’t you?

Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget. (12)

Life and Death

Besides describing the dismal, ash-covered world through which the man and boy walk—in search of home, of the sea, of anyone not ready to eat them—other issues of life bubble to the surface throughout the book

Death reigns in this story, for only few survivors remain, and we get intimate with only two of them. Long ago, even the wife and mother had offed herself, preferring the ease of death over the pain of surviving this world of hunger, pillaging, rape, and cannibalism.

Key to this miserable struggle is the constant, nagging, yet unstated question of: “Why Survive?” McCarthy leaves the answer to that question up to the reader, though the next theme is a likely candidate.

Love

Much to my surprise, what theme stands out most prominently in this novel is love. Although you’d be hard-pressed to find many lines that state it outright, love is the only thing driving the Man on.

Love for his Boy is what keeps him from killing himself. Love for his boy moves his steps forward. Love for his boy hides his own suffering in a vestige of courage and strength. Love alone gives this desolate, post-apocalyptic world hope.

Conclusion

While several other themes creep up in this book, I’ll settle with these. I truly enjoyed this dramatic tale of survival. Although I started reading Cormac McCarthy on the wrong foot and with the wrong book, I’m glad I tried again.

I’ll definitely give him more opportunity in the future, and I actually now regret not buying All the Pretty Horses when I saw it in the thrift store my final week in the States! Oh well. It’s my radar for next time—that is, unless you’ve got another favorite McCarthy novel to suggest in its stead.

©2025 E.T.

Read More Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Novels:

• The Last New Yorkers by George Allen England (1911)
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
• The Last Ship by William Brinkley (1988)
• Minority Report and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick (2004)
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
• The Hunger Games (series) by Suzanne Collins (2008)
• Son of Heaven (series) by David Wingrove (2011)
• Contamination (series) by T.W. Piperbrook (2013)
• Yellowstone (series) by Bobby Akart (2018)
• The Giver by Lois Lowry, adapted by P. Craig Russell (2019)
• Fairy Godparents: Raising a Fairy Child by Indahari Setyo (2020)