“How does the never to be differ from what never was?”
The Road seems like the kind of book that requires little explanation and needs no context. I knew before reading it that Cormac McCarthy’s last son was a young child when he wrote the book—it is dedicated to him—and that he was born when McCarthy was in his 60’s or 70’s, but I actually forgot these personal inspirations while I was reading the novel. The Road is a contemporary revival of the classic father and son journey narrative, but more than that the book questions and explores a father’s self-sacrificing love, and to what extent and under what circumstances that love can be maintained. It does not seem to be a story about McCarthy and his son, or even about a real father and his son, but more an imagined speculation of all that a paternal love could entail. The Road is not literally about a dark and desolate projected future for mankind, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, it is a nightmarish story born of parental anxiety.
“I wash a dead man’s brains out of [my son’s] hair. That is my job. Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire.”
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Road culture, as I understand it, was a subversive kind of travel, an inexpensive and interesting way to meet people and get somewhere at the same time. The blue collar workers nomadically wandering the country tied poverty and hitchhiking together with the road. For Kerouac’s intellectuals it was a kind of uncensored way of seeing the country. There seems to be whole generations that took buses, trains, and cars before commercial airlines. An elderly lady without teeth I met recently told me about taking her children on a bus from New York to Washington D.C., and it seemed instantly odd—they took a bus? Hitchhiking is the predominant activity in On The Road, and the novel seems more about who was met on the way than about the act of traveling from the east coast to the west and back again. Jumping into (and probably out of) freight cars was a practiced art and an acceptable mode of transportation. Neal Cassady stole and dumped cars to make his way across the U.S. And yet I have no idea how true any of these myths, for lack of a better word, are. What I know of “the road” has been passed down from movies, books, songs, various elderly people, and even images. There is something very mythic in the idea of driving great distances. Perhaps because of where I am from, the road is wrapped up in the notion of the west, expansive landscapes of nothingness, winding through farms into cities.
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