Close Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – 5. The Intangible Past

Along the journey, there are several references made to the past alongside various memories of the father. The son is too young to remember and sees the new world through very different eyes to that of his father. At the beginning of the novel the father tries to dial home: “he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father’s house in that long ago” (p.5) The act is desperate and futile. The boy cannot understand what his father is doing. The father never explains his act as though he is ashamed of wanting to be reconnected to his old life.

The father is unable to convey to his son what the old world was like: “He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well … he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.” (p. 163) The past is unreachable. It exists only in the memory of the father which is fickle in its recollection. The ashes of the world has migrated into his heart, the death around him suffocating his own spirit until he is only a shell pretending to be human for the sake of his son’s survival.

The memory of the father is scattered and vague making it difficult for even the reader to imagine what the old world was like: “You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget” (p.11) This shows the pessimism of the father and the novel. He is being frank about life to his son rather than filling him with heartwarming optimisms that we are used to feeding our own children during their youth. This is followed by a glimpse of the father’s childhood spent with his uncle. Although the memory is supposed to be fond there is an air of grief. The focus snaps sharply back the dull grey of the current world; and they are on the move.

As they travel through the various towns and locations, there are hints of a collapsed society: “The billboards had been whited out with thin coats of paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed.” (p. 135) Billboards represent twentieth to twenty-first century society where media, marketing and sales dominated television, magazines and even, now, the internet. In this post-apocalyptic world; materialism has all but vanished. With society deconstructed only the important things are coveted: safety and edible food. McCarthy here highlights how we are reliant on things that are unnecessary.