McCarthy Unabridged: The Road, Page 130
Excerpt
He came across her while stumbling through the woods one night, looking for nothing. He hadn’t wanted to wake the child with his coughing, and out in the darkness he’d nearly stepped on her head. Somehow she hadn’t woken. In the thick darkness, she had become one more insensate log or fungiform growth on the forest floor. She seemed to have built herself a home in the glade. A rickety lean-to huddled against the nearest oak. A firepit smoldered nearby, and he wondered how they hadn’t spotted the column from their camp. He thought he could smell something else though, something that brought saliva flooding into his parched mouth. Next to the embers sat an old ammo canister, baring a belly full of salted meat. This time, he woke the boy. Reaching out to find him, the man let his ragged nails rasp against his sallow cheek. Thin enough to break your heart. Wake up, he whispered. I found something. When the boy smelled the meat, he cried. The man mistook it for gratitude, and swelled with pride, but the boy’s tears were bitter. Where did you get this? he demanded.
I found it. A campsite nearby.
What did you do to them?
Nothing. I found it.
You killed them!
No. No, I just took the meat.
I know. You killed them.
We’re starving.
Take it back.
We could die. The fire could go out.
It’d go out either way. Take it back.
Rationale
A significant part of the moral philosophy that the protagonists of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road use to distinguish themselves from “bad guys” is concerned with property. Several times throughout the book, the man and boy imply that, because the do not steal, they are moral. On page 162, the man indignantly tells Ely that they are not robbers, and on 145, they choose to thank the original owners of the miraculous bunker. This stance is rarely tested though. In the whole book, they never come across a character in possession of something valuable, who could be taken advantage of. I chose to put them in such a situation, because their differing reactions would illustrate a major theme/essential question of the book; in a post-societal world, what good is morality? I placed my excerpt in the period of the duo’s most severe starvation, before they find the bunker. This would give the man a reason to act somewhat amorally to protect the boy, which is consistent with character traits revealed later in the book. In this way, the passage foreshadows the moral decline he experiences shortly before his death. This placement, soon after their encounter with the mansion cannibals on pages 107-115, would also leave the boy seriously concerned with the morality of his actions. I also chose to make the boy the voice of morality, and the man the voice of pragmatism, since these are the roles McCarthy establishes for them elsewhere in the book. In the bunker scene, the man’s first thought is to fill their bellies, while the boy pauses to give thanks. The boy advocates for both Ely, on page 162, and the thief, on page 256, despite the dangers they pose. He is almost like the man’s externalized conscience. Finally, I decided to let the boy win their argument. This was respectful of the conclusions McCarthy seems to find in this philosophical treatise disguised as a novel. Just by letting the boy survive this grisly tale, McCarthy shows us that he believes in the perpetuation of ethics. He seems convinced that morality is the defining characteristic of humanity, and that rejecting earthly desires in favor of higher ideals is, for lack of a better phrase, being human .
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