The Road

The Road is a dystopian fiction novel published in 2006 by American author Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy penned 12 novels, three short stories, and several plays for screen and stage. His works, including Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, are known for violence; postapocalyptic, western settings, and a lack of punctuation characteristic of McCarthy's writing. Widely considered one of the greatest novels of the 21st century, The Road won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. As an imagining of America’s future, the novel is bleak and features very few consolations, exploring themes like How the Apocalypse Would Unfold in a Realistic Setting, What Makes Fatherhood Unique from Motherhood, and Environmental Destruction as a Metaphor for Economic Cruelty. The primary characters, named only “the man” and “the boy,” are distinguished by their will to survive, and the plot is pared down to a death march to an unnamed coast, with each day a fight for mere survival. Its vision of humanity is paranoid and unsparing of sentiment.

This summary refers to the 2007 Vintage edition.

Plot Summary

In a month that may be October, a father leads his son along a road through a vast wasteland where nothing grows and the sun shines through an atmosphere blighted with gray ash. His inventory includes a bit of food in a grocery cart, a pistol with two rounds, and some protective clothing. They are traveling south toward an unnamed coast, collecting fuel for their lantern and food as they go.

Their course along the road is difficult, traversing woods and mountains even as snow falls and ice forms. The man serves the boy as faithfully as he can, protecting him the cold weather and answering his questions. They find many examples of mass death and destruction as the weather cools.

On their journey, they find a few small reprieves from the devastation, including morel mushrooms growing in the woods and a refreshing waterfall. They also find horror, such as when they finds a man dying of burn wounds from a recent fire. Distraught by his wife’s suicide, the man considers killing himself and the boy. Stumbling across a caravan of armed men, the man and the boy narrowly escape. Although the man must kill one of the armed men in front of his son, he assures him, “We’re still the good guys” (77).

Later, the boy thinks he sees another little boy dart out of sight, but the man deems it a hallucination. As their food supply run low, they hide from slave armies and scenes of mass slaughter, culminating in another close escape from cannibals. At one point, they discover a cellar filled with chained individuals kept alive by cannibals, who eat the captives one limb at a time.

Three days later, on the verge of death, they find a hidden bomb shelter filled with enough food to sustain them for further travel. The man reassures the boy, “This is what the good guys do. They don’t give up” (137). Their respite is short, however, and their journey soon continues.

They meet a puzzling man old named Ely who espouses a philosophy of nihilism and survival. They feed him minimally and then keep moving without him. Traveling further, the man realizes something is wrong with his health. The boy, who grows more independent every day, shows signs irresponsibility typical of someone so young, like forgetting to strike camp properly.

As they travel doggedly toward the coast, the man does not talk about his illness, and the boy does not bring it up. For a time, the man falls ill, and the boy cares for him. They find further evidence of human degradation and cannibalism on the road but keep going.

When they reach the coast, it is as desolate and barren as the rest of the country. They camp for a while, ransacking an old yacht. The boy fall ill with flu-like symptoms, and the man nurses him back to health. As the boy recovers, the man grows sicker and begins to bleed internally.

When they discover that someone stole their cart of supplies, the man tracks the thief and nearly kills him, to the boy's despair. Later, they emerged victorious in a skirmish in a small town, but the man is wounded in the leg by an arrow. Injured and coughing blood, the man can no longer travel. The boy cares for him for several days, but the man finally dies, assuring the boy that his luck will change.

Almost immediately after the man's death, a kindhearted stranger finds the boy. He takes the boy into his family, which consists of two other children and a woman. The stranger assures the boy that he too is one of the “good guys.”