Meaning of the Work as a Whole

My final thoughts on The Road are ones of mild awe.  The Road is a journey, an adventure to say the least.  It takes you through many hopeless nights, soul crushing days, and just plain exhausting experiences.  And so, with the conclusion of any adventure, The Road forces you to take some time to absorb what you read.  The Road questions much of what drives humanity. Specifically, The Road questions the relationship between morals and survival.  It is no debate that survival becomes much easier once you abandon your morals. However, this book challenges this idea, and forces the reader to question whether or not survival, by the means of eating a newborn baby, is truly survival.  

From my interpretations, the meaning of The Road is, to bluntly state the fact, humans are innately a "cruel species".  Most humans, under certain circumstances, will be willing to commit hideous acts to survive, whether or not this makes humans a cruel species or simply a rational species is up for further debate (however, through McCarthy's depiction of the main characters and the torch, it  seems as though he argues that this makes the human species innately cruel).  Furthermore, McCarthy then takes this idea of our innate needs for survival, and challenges them to our humanity, our sense of morals.  McCarthy does this through the contrast of his main characters and the world they are forced to endure.  The Road illustrates this horrible environment in which humans have turned to animals (and food).  The Road then throws two characters, still holding on to their humanity, into this world and has them face the challenges of survival which tests their morals.  In doing so, the reader begins to unravel this confusing, contradicting question.  Is to survive at the costs of your humanity truly survival?  Much of this idea I explore thoroughly in previous blog posts as this question is brought to the attention of the reader fairly early in the novel.  However, the conclusion of this novel and how it contributes to answering this question is a path left unpaved.

Towards the end of the novel, the man and the boy reach the coast. The man comes to the realization that he is dying and begins to give in to dreams of his wife and a much simpler time.  As discussed earlier, these thoughts imply that the man is giving into his passing.  In doing so, it is possible the man is losing some level of his morals as well.  While seeking to establish suitable conditions for his son's survival after his death, a thief steals all of their supplies.  The man and the boy chase down the thief and find him with all of their belongings.  At gunpoint the man forces the thief to remove all clothing and flee, an act surely sentencing him to death.  The boy protests and begs to spare the thief, but the man replies that the thief was doing no different to them by taking everything they owned.  After the thief’s departure, the boy convinces the man to leave behind his clothes in hopes that the thief will return.  In this section the man, for the first time, kills another man out of revenge rather than defense.  In past scenes, the man as been forced to kill an attacker and abandon a weak survivor (due to inability to care for him).  However, for the first time in the novel the man has essentially killed the thief out of revenge by casting him off without so much as the clothes on his back.  Furthermore, the man recognizes the wrongs of his actions as he allows himself to be criticized by the boy and seeks to make amends.  This sudden change in the man’s perception of right and wrong could be due to his impending death.  The man could have become more desperate for survival, or more accurately, the survival of his son.  Because of this desperation, he begins to lose sight of some of his morals and feels as though casting the thief off was the right thing to do.  This could be more support for the idea that as we become more desperate for survival, we may begin to lose morals and act irrationally (or in the eyes of some, more rationally).  

Overall, the meaning of The Road is a complex interpretation of human nature.  The Road analyzes the flexibility of human behavior and how it adapts to the circumstances.  It does this by delivering a fairly simple plotline with a brutally honest depiction of the post-apocalyptic world. It is truly a fitting novel for the discussion of human nature.