See what I did there? Pretty funny.....
Anyway, after 241 pages of starvation, pain, anguish, mistrust, suicide, infanticide, and cannibalism, the man's journey has come to an end, much to the boy's dismay. His cough finally caught up to him.
"He slept close to his father that night and held him but when he woke in the morning his father was cold and stiff. He sat there a long time weeping and then he got up and walked out through the woods to the road. When he came back he knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again."
Devastated, the boy stays with his papa for days. However, just when it looked like all hope was lost for the boy, a glimmer of light finally pierced the darkness. A man emerges to talk to the boy.
As Guy Pierce's character states, the boy has two choices. He can stay where he is, and most certainly die while protecting his father's corpse, and take a leap of faith, and leave with him. The entire book McCarthy teaches us to distrust human beings, and then in the most important scene of the book, we must place all hope in a stranger. This reveals two pieces of information. The first is that in no way is the boy prepared for life on his own. No matter how hard his father tried, he is too young, too weak, and too inexperienced. His father failed him.
The second is that in situations of life and death, you have to take a chance. Without that stranger coming along, the boy would die very quickly. Yet, if he goes with the stranger, it would go against everything his father taught him, and he most certainly be killed. McCarthy uses this Catch 22 situation effectively to put strain on the reader and the boy.
The ending is hopeful, shifting in tone dramatically from the bleakness of the rest of the film, and presenting a future for the boy in which he is not savagely murdered, but loved and protected. This juxtaposition of his life with his father with his life with the stranger's family forces the reader to realize and uncomfortable truth. The man was wrong about people. There are good ones out there, who are also carrying the fire.
Great analysis, Justin! Do you think the boy's father truly failed him? Like you said, he was too young and too inexperienced. Is that something that his father could have taught him, or are qualities like that acquired over time?
ReplyDeleteAw, thanks Coopy :). Perhaps the father felt as though he failed his son, but it is questionable whether it was possible for him to prepare his son. I'm going to be pondering this question in the future.
DeleteI have read All the Pretty Horses, also by McCarthy, and it had no such "light at the end of the tunnel," but that was something that I actually enjoyed about it; he was being realistic, and there really was little hope for the characters. Do you think that this happier (relatively) ending would be better than a depressing one?
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to say, but the hopeful ending here is only hopeful relative to the rest of the novel, which is so bleak. The thought of spending my entire life with strangers instead of my family is weird to say the least, but then again I do not live in this world. In spite of all the darkness in The Road, the ending fit for me. It is a new beginning for the boy, a renaissance as he becomes a man, which is what the whole book worked toward. I'd be interested to know if McCarthy ever wrote a more dark ending to this novel.
DeleteDid the style of the end shift at all to reflect this more optimistic idea? or is there anything specific to suggest that the future is more positive for the boy with this new man?
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons I really like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which also includes a post-apocalyptic scenario, is that he blends the horrors of human nature with the beauty of the kindnesses that people are capable of. I was reading it during the week of the Boston Marathon bombing, so the juxtaposition of the two reflected in the novel was incredibly powerful.
The end shifted in tone a bit, there was a few paragraphs of epilogue-like exposition lightly detailing the following years with his new family. His new adopted parents seemed content that they got to care for their children, and wholesome as they went to great lengths to preserve family lifestyle. The syntax and word choice did not change much, but the tone definitely did.
ReplyDelete