In The Road, Cormac McCarthy uses nameless characters, sparse language, and an ultimately hopeless ending to convey the fear of the situation. Many novels focus on an apocalyptic scenario, but the plot of The Road is especially mournful. We follow a broken family, both father and son haunted by the memory of the women who was their wife/mother. The man has constant dreams of her, and even notes that he doesn't want to wake up from those dreams, while the son wishes he could join her, even though she is dead. The danger is constant and especially violent and visceral, with cannibalism, infanticide, and breeding human babies to eat all appearing. Because violence and terror are typical in the world of The Road, the very ordinariness of these events demonstrate the constant fear in the book.
None of the main characters have names. This contributes to the fear in the book, because the characters represent us all; what is happening to them could happen to us. Perhaps even more jarring is the thought that, in McCarthy's world, things as basic as a name no longer matter. Terror and stark survival have eroded identity to the point where identity only exists as the cannibals, the dead, and those who are not yet dead. The mother is an especially disturbing figure. Not only does she choose to die, choose to leave her son motherless, she also articulates how there are no survivors in this world: "We're not survivors. We're the walking dead in a horror film...my only hope is eternal nothingness and I hope it with all of my heart" (McCarthy 57). We are used to seeing parents do anything, sacrifice anything for their children, but the mother in this novel is so paralyzed by her new reality that she gives up. She abandons her child to this harsh, unforgiving world.
McCarthy further demonstrates the constant slog his characters experience through his writing. There are no breaks in the book; no pauses, no chapters, no easy places to stop. Just like the characters, the reader cannot stop. Also, McCarthy deliberately avoids quotation marks and apostrophes, showing again how normal conventions are meaningless in a hopeless world.
Although the father dies, the son is rescued by seemingly good people. But is the ending a happy or hopeful one? First, there is the reality of the true crisis all living people face in the novel. In a world without plants or animals, where nothing can grow, the end is not far off. At one point, people will run out of canned food. Then they will be left with a horrific choice: cannibalism or death. Eventually, even those who choose cannibalism will die. We do not see it, but we know that there is unlikely to be a happy ending. Note, too, that McCarthy doesn't end the novel with the boy's new life, but in a cave that use to have fish: "Once there were brook trout in the streams in the meadow...Of a thing which could not be put back" (McCarthy 286). Here, instead of ending with the boy safe and healing, we end with the warning that not everything can be saved.
The Road is so effective at sparking fear in the reader, in part, because of the details that are left out. The main characters are a father and a son. McCarthy does not tell us their names, and gives few details of their personal lives before the catastrophe. They are essentially blank slates, so that every reader can imagine him- or herself in the same situation. The nature of the catastrophe that ruins the world is not named, either. In this way, McCarthy allows the reader to imagine whatever he or she is most afraid of—a nuclear disaster, severe pollution leading to global warming, chemical warfare. The "bad guys" are not given a motive beyond simple hunger and perhaps opportunity (now that the world is lawless), which makes them nearly impossible to understand or defeat. This spare, bleak set-up ignites the reader's imagination and lets him or her fill in the gaps.
The novel is haunting, rather than just scary, because of the nature of the father's dilemma. He is slowly dying. He knows that he is dying and that he will have to leave his son unprotected in a world that is dangerous and unfeeling. Every reader can imagine trying to spare an innocent child from the horrors of the destroyed world, from cannibalism and torture, cold and privation. In the end, there is little the father can do to protect his son. He dies, and the son goes off with some strangers—possibly good guys, but possibly not. This ambiguous ending leaves the reader with a feeling that evil forces in the world are uncontrollable and unavoidable. The novel is unrelentingly bleak, even at the end, which is part of what makes it so terrifying.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a truly haunting post-apocalyptic novel, chronicling the journey of a man and his son in a polluted world haunted by cannibals. What's scary about the book is that it doesn't appear to be set that far in the future; indeed, for all we know, the book could be set in the very near future, not terribly far removed from the present.
Additionally, this future is not characterized by flashy gadgets or advanced technology, but by a diminished human population that has reverted to a primitive, almost animalistic way of life. The book's protagonists also have nowhere to go; the world's climate is suffering from devastating pollution following some unnamed catastrophe, leading to a claustrophobic tone throughout the novel.
What makes this scenario truly frightening is the apocalyptic nature of the setting contrasted with the tender human relationship between the man and the boy, a last remnant of the civilized world. It reminds us of the fragility of human existence, of how easy it would be to lose all of the things about our communities and our world that we truly care about. The terrifying simplicity of this message, delivered in McCarthy's spare writing style, forces us to consider what would truly happen if society collapsed, a frightening prospect that lingers well after the book has been finished.
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