Before them the father pushes a shopping cart filled with blankets, cans of food and a few other assets, like jars of lamp oil or gasoline siphoned from the tanks of abandoned vehicles-the cart is equipped with a bicycle mirror so that they will not be surprised from behind. A pistol with only a few bullets is their only defense besides flight. They possess only what they can scavenge to eat, and the rags they wear and the heat of their own bodies are all the shelter they have. The boy and his father hope to avoid the marauders, reach a milder climate, and perhaps locate some remnants of civilization still worthy of that name. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads.

Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.Īmerican fiction (fictional works by one author),įathers And Sons_Fiction Fiction_Dystopian Fiction_Science Fiction_General American Fiction (FictĬormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work.

It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. They have nothing just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-and each other. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.Ī father and his son walk alone through burned America.

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