SPOILER ALERT!
Perhaps the main theme of The Road is what happens to us and to our ethics in situations of scarcity and survival. In some post-apocalyptic scenario, the father and son regard themselves as ‘good guys’ (‘no matter what’) trying to avoid the bad guys as they travel south. Yet the difference between them is very slight: the good guys don’t eat people, nor do they kill others unless provoked. But that’s it; they do still kill people if needs be, they scavenge, they even steal, and they don’t help other people; nor do they trust anyone else. As Aristotle realised, we need certain social and political conditions to be fulfilled before we can begin to develop virtue, think about what the good life is and how to become excellent human beings. Starving and scavenging don’t fulfil those conditions. It is more than that however, the scope for ethical action is massively reduced because the father and son scarcely ever meet other people, and it’s only when we start to talk about how relate to others that we move into the territory of ethics.
The father and son have each other, of course. The boy is the father’s ‘warrant’, the ‘word of God’, an ‘angel’, a ‘god’. When the father and son meet the old, poor-sighted man who calls himself Eli, he says he thought the boy was an angel walking towards him, but his father says, ‘he’s a god’. Eli thinks if there is a god ‘he would have turned his face from us by now’, and that whoever made humanity won’t find any humanity here anymore. In a world without God, the boy becomes the source of ethics, the fount of meaning, the reason to go on. (There’s a great line in the novel that didn’t make it to the film in which the father says to himself something like, ‘I pick brains out of his hair because that’s my job.’)
Perhaps here we find the reason the boy is never named: he represents the future of humanity, he’s carrying ‘the fire’. This interpretation is strengthened by the conversation they have with Eli, who represents the past generations of humanity. Eli says he thought he would never see another child again. He himself used to have a boy but he’s gone now, for reasons we never discover. Here I would hazard that Eli is named after the old, blind priest Eli in 1 Samuel. His sons are meant to take over from him in leading the national life of ancient Israel but they are so badly behaved that God kills them. Eli is warned about this judgement through the young boy Samuel whose mother has given him to the service of the Temple. Eli thinks the boy is an angel, which is the Greek word for ‘messenger’, just as Samuel is chosen by God to deliver a message of judgement to Eli. Eli in The Road claims that he always thought something was coming, had always believed the predictions, just as Eli of the Hebrew Scriptures accepts God’s judgement. Of course the boy has no message (there is no God to give it in the world of the film and novel) he is the message. He is the incarnation of judgement and hope (‘a god’). To look at the boy is to see what they have done to him.
The boy acts as the source of ethics in another way. The father trusts no-one – if he had his own way they would have passed Eli on the road – but the boy is willing to trust people if it they are not immediately and obviously bad. He trusts Eli, and he is more generous to the only other person they speak to on the road. This character steals their clothes and food but they catch up with him. He claims he’s starving and they would have done the same thing in his position. This is an interesting ethical issue in itself, but in terms of the film, what is perhaps more significant is that the father makes him completely undress, effectively leaving him for dead. The boy objects, saying they will cause his death, implicitly suggesting they are becoming as bad as the bad guys. The father claims it is just punishment since he did the same to them, and that he has to teach his son how to survive when he’s gone. It is as if they have returned to the harsh law of the frontier, when the severity of punishments tried to make up for the small number of state apparatuses (sheriffs, courts) to administer them.
It quickly becomes clear that the father sees his role as keeping the boy alive as long as possible and, when (not if) it comes to it, killing him to save him from the suffering that the more Hobbesian survivors will force on him. This evokes the journey of Abraham and Isaac to the mountain on which God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. In that story, God interrupts the sacrifice at the crucial moment through an angel and provides a ram instead. In The Road, the father, as he lays dying, is unable to kill his son, though he feels it is his duty (he thought it was his desire), though the boy is the word of God to him. This could be read as a massive ethical failure: his only responsibilities lie with the boy and now he cannot fulfil them. Perhaps it is a hold over from their previous life in which killing one’s child was an unimaginable prospect. Yet in turns out to be a fortunate occurrence, because the boy meets others who seem to survive and perhaps even make something more of a life for themselves (again, the boy’s ability to trust them makes is redemption possible). In the Hebrew Scriptures in which the original text appears, human failure as a means of God’s gracious action to overtake circumstances and bring about good is a common theme, but in McCarthy’s worlds ‘grace’ is extremely rare; we might better call this luck than grace. (There is a scene in which the father and son stumble upon a storehouse of food. The father seems to see this as extremely good luck. The boy senses something more: he feels an element of gratitude and wants someone to thank. He is uncertain how to do this (presumably he’s never had to thank anyone before), but opts for a classic prayerful pose. Grace and prayer are replaced by thanking dead people for their good luck).
Or perhaps we should view this a different way, perhaps the father’s reluctance to kill the boy is the correct interpretation of the ‘word of God’. We could support this by saying that as Eli turns the story from 1 Samuel inside out, so here elements of the original are subverted. In Hebrew Scriptures, mountains are often places of divine presence and revelation, whereas the sea is a place of chaos, a symbol of what resists God. In The Road the father and son deliberately travel to the coast and the sea; they’re going the opposite (wrong?) way. When the boy meets the other man at the end of the film, the man tells him to stay off the road and comments that the boy’s been ‘weirded out’. This suggests the father had the wrong plan all along, did not know the truth, the real state of things.
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