English Studies

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Christianity and Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Eric Pudney

To cite this article: Eric Pudney (2015) Christianity and Cormac McCarthy's The Road , English
Studies, 96:3, 293-309, DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2014.996383

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2014.996383

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English Studies, 2015
Vol. 96, No. 3, 293–309, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2014.996383

Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s

The Road
Eric Pudney

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road takes place not before or during but after the end. The novel
follows a man and his son as they seek to survive in what remains of the world after some
unspecified cataclysmic event. There is almost nothing left: no society, no food, no animals,
no hope. Many readers will feel that the question the novel poses is why anyone would wish
to continue living under such circumstances. But although that question might be more
urgent post-apocalypse, it is in fact one that can always be asked: what, if anything,
makes human life valuable and worthwhile? The novel provides answers to these
questions, but these answers are contradictory. The reader is left with a choice between
powerful arguments for both faith and despair. In The Road, hope is associated with
Christianity and hopelessness with an atheistic understanding of the world. Nonetheless,
the novel makes it clear that faith is no easy option. This article will begin by discussing
the importance of Christian imagery in the novel, focusing on the key symbolic
dimensions of fire and darkness, before going on to show how both Christian and
atheistic readings are not only made possible, but actively put forward by the text. It
will be argued that the novel presents a powerful challenge to both Christian and
atheistic views of the world, without ever actually rejecting either.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is a work suffused with Christian imagery, as can
be seen in the recurring motifs of fire and darkness.1 Fire is a complex and ambiguous
symbol, both in the novel and in Judeo-Christian tradition. Fire has obvious negative
associations of hellfire and the fires of lust, for example, but in the Old Testament God
himself is twice described as a “consuming fire”.2 In that context, fire is a purifying
force. In The Road, fire is most frequently represented as something destructive. The
original disaster that wiped out civilization clearly involved fire. The boy and his
father come across the remains of “the dead … half-mired in the blacktop”3 – the

Eric Pudney is affiliated with the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University, Sweden. Email:
Eric.Pudney@englund.lu.se
1
For a different approach to this topic, see Josephs, 133–145.
2
Deut. 4:24, Heb. 12:29 KJV.
3
McCarthy, 203. Hereafter cited by page number.

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

294 E. Pudney
remains of people who literally sank into the molten road. When the boy asks why they
didn’t leave the road, his father tells him they couldn’t because “Everything was on fire”
(204). Later, they come across a coastal city in which “melted window glass hung
frozen down the walls like icing on a cake” (291). The fiery character of the earth’s
destruction is reminiscent of the wrath of God, as presented in various parts of the
Bible. In Revelation, the “fire of the altar” is cast onto the earth,4 which burns up
“the third part of trees” and “all green grass”5, while in Genesis, Sodom and Gomorrah
are destroyed by “brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven”6.
In The Road, fire has been responsible for more suffering after the catastrophe as
well. The man refers in passing to the fact that there are “No more balefires on the
distant ridges. He thought the bloodcults must have all consumed one another”
(15). Balefire is an archaic term referring to a beacon or funeral pyre; but it also
suggests “baleful” and Baal, the name given to a number of gods worshipped in pre-
Christian times. The priests of Baal are referred to more than once in the Bible,
burning incense in order to worship their god7 and being defeated by the prophet
Elijah, a point to which I will return. One of the names given to the Devil in the Chris-
tian tradition—Beelzebub (“Lord of the Flies”)—is derived from Baal (“Lord”). The
brief reference to bloodcults in the novel could be taken to indicate that humanity
has been punished for its worship of false gods, a recurrent theme in the Old Testa-
ment. However, it seems likely that the cults sprang up in response to the destruction
of the earth, rather than causing it. The man remembers

[p]eople sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their
clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others would come to help them. Within a
year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the mur-
dered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. (32–3)

At first, people tried to help one another. It is only as time passes, and food becomes
scarce, that the bonds tying people together break apart completely. The fires on the
ridges here must be the balefires started by the bloodcults, which must also be respon-
sible for the “deranged chanting”. Just before this passage it is mentioned that there are
no longer any “godspoke men” on the road, and that they have taken the world with
them. This might be taken as a hint, as one critic suggests, that religious strife is respon-
sible for destroying the world8, but there is little else in the novel to suggest this. The
statement about the “godspoke men” could simply imply that the truly godly and the
truly good have all been killed, perhaps by worshippers of false gods. The cruelty
described here—people impaled on spikes—is reminiscent of the late medieval and
early modern era in Europe, a time when religious persecution was intense and violent.

4
Rev. 8:5.
5
Ibid., 8:7.
6
Gen. 19:24.
7
2 Kings 23:5.
8
Rambo, 108.
 Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 295

However, while fire is usually presented as destructive, there is also a positive side to
it. Fire in the novel also represents civilization, the possibility of technological devel-
opment and a more secure life. The most basic example of its usefulness is that, in
the cold world which they inhabit, fire is essential for keeping the man and his son
warm and for cooking food. When they take refuge in a house later in the novel,
one of the first things the man does is to light a fire, and “[t]he warming house
creaked and groaned. Like a thing being called out of long hibernation” (224). The
safety of a home and all that it implies—civilization, security, comfort—is brought
back to life here by fire. The man and his son also understand themselves to be “carry-
ing the fire” (87). The man uses this comforting idea to reassure his son that no harm
will come to them, and it is linked to the fact that they are looking for other “good
guys”—possibly people to whom they can pass on the fire.
Even so, fire as the basis of civilization and precondition of technological develop-
ment is not an entirely positive element. This is the view of fire familiar from the myth
of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give it to humanity and was punished by
Zeus in consequence. Prometheus is a heroic figure, and the gift of fire is seen as a good
thing for humanity, but the common aspect of forbidden knowledge links this story to
the story of the fall told in Genesis. Here, Adam and Eve disobey God and eat the for-
bidden fruit, but doing so leads to disaster. If fire is a precondition for technological
development and civilization, it may well be that Prometheus’ gift also led to disaster
in the long run. If the actual cause of the disaster was a nuclear war, as some critics have
concluded9, then technological development is clearly not an unmixed blessing. At the
very least, it is ironic that “carrying the fire” represents goodness in a world which has
been destroyed by fire.
Whatever its origins, the fire that destroyed everything has left its mark. There is
“dust and ash everywhere” (5); almost everything the man and boy find is “covered
with ash and dust” (11). These words, ash and dust, are most familiar in a religious
context from the words of the funeral service, but the words are also repeatedly
used in the Bible itself. According to the Old Testament, God created Adam from
“the dust of the ground”10. Later, Abraham comments that he is “but dust and
ashes”11. This association raises the disturbing possibility that part of what the
father and his son are breathing in is in fact human remains, reduced to the dust
and ashes out of which humanity was created.
One of the effects of all this dust and ash is to make the world darker and colder:
there is so much of it in the atmosphere that it blocks the light of the sun, which is
described as “banished” (32). The darkness of the world is emphasized from the
start: the first two sentences of the novel use the words “dark” or “darkness” three
times, and the word “cold” appears twice in the first three sentences. The third

9
See Cooper, 218, for a list of examples.
10
Gen. 2:7.
11
Ibid., 18:27.
296 E. Pudney
sentence, which describes the darkness of the nights, is unusually phrased: “Like the
onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world”. Glaucoma is a disease affect-
ing the optic nerve which leads to a gradual and irreversible impairment, and even-
tually total loss, of vision. Consequently, the darkness of the nights and the greyness
of the days here are associated with deterioration of vision, blindness and the slow dis-
appearance of the world from view. According to the Bible, “he that hateth his brother
is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because
that darkness hath blinded his eyes”.12 Obviously, this verse links evil—hating one’s
brother—to darkness, but it also suggests that darkness causes blindness. This idea
is crucial in The Road. The world of the novel has darkened both literally and meta-
phorically, and this darkness is a feature both of the world itself and of the few
people who are still living in it.
The effects of walking in darkness are pronounced, even on a good man like the pro-
tagonist of the novel. At one point, when the man wakes up in the night:

[h]e rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for
balance … To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He
took great marching steps into the nothingness … Upright to what? Something
nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common sat-
ellite. Like the grey pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day move-
ments of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it
must. (14)

McCarthy’s intriguing adjective “autistic” suggests the difficulty of interpersonal

relations in this dark new world. The “fall” in this passage can be read as the fall of
man, the loss of the prelapsarian state of innocence described in Genesis, which is ana-
logous to what has happened to the world in this novel: there has been a second fall
from grace. The passage suggests that the collapse of society, which happened sud-
denly, like a fall, was preceded by a slower decline—perhaps decline of a moral
nature. But the other sense of the word “declination”—a term used in astronomy refer-
ring to an angle measured in degrees—suggests that this is also meant literally and in
reference to the man. The man can fall if he does not find his balance; he needs to be
able to stand upright, and this is difficult, as he needs to use his arms “outheld for
balance”. “Upright” therefore relates to the angle at which he stands, but this invites
the question “Upright to what?” The obvious, prosaic answer is “to the earth”, but
the man no longer experiences himself as standing on solid ground—he has stepped
out into “nothingness”. His sense of dislocation here seems visceral, the gut-wrenching
experience of having no fixed surface on which to stand.
Of course, the word “upright” also commonly refers to being morally upstanding.
Interpreted from this perspective, the man’s question “Upright to what?” suggests
that the man needs some ground from which he can measure the moral status of
his actions. In the answer he gives himself, he identifies this ground as the moral

12
1 John 2:11.
 Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 297

and physical centre of the universe—both the stars and he himself revolve around it.
This centre can only be God, a Christian would say, but God appears to have with-
drawn from this world; there is only “something nameless in the night”. However,
the man has not completely given in to despair. He asserts here that the universe
must know; that there is a guiding intelligence behind it. And this intelligence is a
lode—literally a rich deposit of mineral ore, but figuratively a source of buried or
hidden goodness behind the evil of the material world. The word also suggests “lode-
star”—a guiding principle or a fixed point of reference in an uncertain universe—and
“lodestone”, a naturally magnetized mineral used in the first compasses to help guide
travellers to their destination. The man can only conceive of God in metaphorical
terms, but he does not doubt the existence of a higher being.
In the passage above, then, the man’s faith is damaged, but he still believes. At other
times, though, he seems to lose his faith altogether:

he saw for a moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of
the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running.
The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals
trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world
and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (138)

Moral questions are again linked to the physical functioning of the universe—God’s
creation—as they were in the previous passage. But here, instead of a lode or matrix
which “knows”, the universe is only a “crushing black vacuum”: emptiness, an
absence of everything. This universe is run not by any guiding intelligence but by phys-
ical laws which are “relentless”, “implacable” and, perhaps worst of all, “blind”. The
man and his son are reduced to “hunted animals”, no longer occupying the privileged
place accorded to human beings by a God who created them in his own image. The
earth is “intestate”—meaning in the literal sense that it has not made a will, and there-
fore will not be (figuratively) inherited by the meek or the godly, who are nearly all
dead. All this seems to the man, at this moment, an absolute and unbearable truth.
The man’s painful “absolute truth” is not new, of course. A similar notion was
expressed by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche tells
the story of the madman who makes the following speech:

“Where is God?” he cried. “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I! We are all
his murderers … What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we
not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is
there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite
nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and
more night coming again and again … God is dead … And we have killed him!
How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers!”13

13
Nietzsche, Gay Science, 119–20.
298 E. Pudney
Nietzsche’s language in this passage resembles the language used by McCarthy in the
passages cited above. The connection between God’s absence and the banishment of
the sun, endless night, and the bewilderment of a world in which there is no longer
any up or down—upright to what?, as McCarthy puts it—is present in both texts. A
godless universe is described in terms of astronomy: cold, empty and indifferent
space. Nietzsche’s assertion that “we” have killed God refers to the fact of scientific pro-
gress. The discovery of the universe as a space mainly comprising nothingness—a place
unintended by any higher power and therefore meaningless—is the immediate cause of
God’s (metaphorical) death. At the same time, Nietzsche presents this understanding
of the cosmos as the terrifying consequence of God’s death. McCarthy’s novel is clearly
preoccupied with very similar ideas about the place of humanity in a godless, or at least
seemingly godless, universe.
The man’s struggle between faith and doubt is a recurring theme in the novel, but his
interest in religion is often rooted in more practical concerns. At times, he seems gen-
uinely to believe in God, not least when he rages against his creator. Sometimes he des-
pairs. But at other times he takes comfort in ritual, if only because he needs it in order
to survive:
he sat holding [the boy] while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this
like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else
construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them. (77–8)

In doing this, the man follows the advice his wife gave him before she committed
suicide: “you wont survive for yourself … A person who had no one would be well
advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it
along with words of love.” (59). Both the man and his wife mention that the cer-
emonies or the ghost should be “breathed upon”, recalling the passage in Genesis in
which God breathes life into Adam.14 The reference to anointing also has religious con-
notations. Intense faith is required just to maintain the will to survive. The man’s wife
lost this will, along with any Christian belief she may have had: all she hopes for is
“eternal nothingness”. The man, however, is able to maintain his faith, though not
without extreme difficulty. He does this, on the one hand, because he has to for his
son’s sake. But it is also only because of his son’s existence that he can consider life
to be worth living at all: the man and his boy are therefore mutually dependent –
“each the other’s world entire” (4).
The man’s thoughts about God are frequently described in the language of physical
space, and this is why the “tattered oilcompany roadmap” (44) that he and his son use
is so important to them. What they need—what anyone needs—is a physical, moral
and social space in which they can locate themselves:

The boy … sat looking at the map. The man watched him. He thought he knew what
that was about. He’d pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town

14
Gen. 2:7.
 Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 299

where he lived. Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory. Them-
selves among others, everything in its place. Justified in the world. (194)

The map functions as an important symbol of the man’s faith. It is of little practical use,
since the man has no reason to head towards any specific destination: everywhere is
equally devastated. Despite this, the map’s function is to show the man and his son
where they are going and how to get there. The centrality of the issue of locating
oneself and finding the right path is indicated by the title of the novel. Finding a
path is a frequently occurring metaphor in the Bible, too: for example in Psalms
16:11 and Proverbs 2:19, and God shows people the correct path, the path of justice
or the path of life. The man often has trouble understanding his son’s concerns and
thoughts, but he seems to understand the boy’s need to place himself when he looks
at the map in the passage above. Appropriately enough, though, the map is very
worn—broken into pieces, in fact—and the “limp and rotting pages” (209), once
held together by tape, now have to be numbered with crayons (43) so that it can be
assembled. The parlous condition of the map is indicative of the man’s confusion,
the doubtful state of his faith, and his struggle to lead a just life in a world over
which darkness has descended. Later in the novel, the man is struck by the beauty
of the sextant which he finds on the shipwreck. The impression it makes on him is
of a piece with his yearning for a vanished past in which things of beauty were possible,
but it is also significant that the object he finds is a tool used in navigation: again, a
thing which helps one finds one’s way.
The difficulty of finding one’s way is a result of the blindness and ignorance caused
by the ever-present darkness. On top of everything else that has disappeared, even
intangible things like knowledge are slowly draining away from the world:

He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world
shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly fol-
lowing those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally
the names of things one believed to be true … The sacred idiom shorn of its referents
and so of its reality. (93)

This passage describes the darkening of the world in linguistic terms. The things
referred to by words have died out and so the words also die out, or perhaps things
cease to exist because language is so degraded—the only things left, at least as far as
the man is concerned, are those of which it is still possible to speak. Either way, as
humanity dies out, so does language. The power of naming given to Adam by
God,15 which is perhaps the defining characteristic of mankind’s ascendancy over
the rest of God’s creation, will gradually be lost. At first, simple nouns disappear;
but the last part of this process is “things one believed to be true”, such as the existence
of God—the “sacred idiom” being the language of religion. The final sentence resists
straightforward interpretation. It could be taken to mean that God’s existence is no

15
Ibid., 2:19–20.
300 E. Pudney
longer possible because humanity has lost the words with which to discuss him, or that
in the absence of language with which to discuss God, it will no longer be possible to
believe in him. Clearly, though, the fading of language from the world is part of the
metaphorical darkness that is slowly enveloping the earth, causing everything to disap-
pear by degrees.
The language of the novel itself reflects this “shrinking down”. McCarthy’s prose is
for the most part functional and spare, describing actions rather than elaborating on
inner states and feelings. The love that exists between the father and his son is
beautifully depicted, but this is achieved without any hyperbole: the man’s frequent
observation about his son’s thinness is quietly effective in communicating his love
and his fears for the boy. Violence and horror are described in bare, practical terms,
as in the confrontation with a cannibal: “The man had already dropped to the
ground and he swung with him and levelled the pistol and fired from a two-handed
position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet” (68). A lot of factual infor-
mation about the event is communicated here with no embellishment whatsoever.
Action, not thought or words, is what counts in this world. The shooting is the inevi-
table result of the man’s encounter with the cannibal. The man tries to talk his way out
of the situation, but though he has a gun and the cannibal only a knife, his attempt at
reasoning is perceived as weakness: “I think you’re chickenshit”, says the roadrat. The
language of the novel is also fragmented, with frequent breaks in the narration, often in
unexpected places, and unorthodox punctuation suggesting the fragmentation both of
the world and of the man’s psyche. The lack of any personal names often leaves the
reader in some doubt as to whom the pronoun “he” refers to. All this reflects the
descent into a world in which the only imperative is survival.
As with fire, the darkness that has enveloped the world is paradoxical in nature. On
the one hand, it has caused ignorance and moral blindness. At the same time, it seems
that the darkness that has descended is a necessary condition for the perception of the
true nature of the world. It is only after the darkness has fallen, after all, that “the frailty
of everything” is “revealed at last” (28). How can darkness be revelatory while simul-
taneously causing ignorance and blindness? The novel answers this question by means
of the interplay of fire and darkness, which is represented repeatedly in various inci-
dents. First, the man climbs up onto a trailer and peers into the skylight, looking
for anything that might be of use. It is too dark inside the trailer to see anything, so
he takes some pages from an old magazine and sets them on fire, then drops the
burning pages into the trailer. Having done so, he is able to see “[h]uman bodies.
Sprawled in every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes” (48). Later,
while looking for food in an apparently empty house, the man pries open a hatch
leading to a cellar. Unable to see inside the cellar, “he flicked the lighter and swung
the flame out over the darkness like an offering … Huddled against the back wall
were people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their
hands” (116). The man has discovered an enclosure for human livestock. In one par-
ticularly vivid example, the man remembers an incident from his childhood, at a time
when he was a little older than his son is now:
 Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 301

[A group of men] opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and
brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number … Like the
bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them
and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as
they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled
burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they
were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched them burn and
writhe in just such silence themselves. (200–1)

The man’s memory serves to foreshadow the catastrophe that is yet to come. The men
(and humanity in general) are implicitly identified with the snakes, which they watch
in “just such silence themselves”. Just a few pages later, the man and his son come
across “the dead … half-mired in the blacktop”—more victims of a fiery death.
Again, a dark, enclosed space has been lit up by the light of a flame, which reveals
something horrific inside. The repetition of this pattern—darkness lit by fire, to
reveal a hidden horror—develops the apocalyptic theme of revelation: seeing what
could not be seen, the sheer horror of an underlying and hitherto unsuspected
reality becoming perceptible. Both fire and darkness are necessary for this revelation.
One issue that has divided critics of the novel is the possible divinity of the boy
(Kunsa argues for this view, Kearney against).16 It is stated from the start that the
man understands his son to be holy in some way: “If he is not the word of God
God never spoke” (3). There is a degree of ambiguity in this statement—it leaves
open the possibility that God never spoke—but despite his occasional doubts, the
man maintains his belief that the boy is a messiah. Certainly, the boy is good—
perhaps impossibly so, given the nature of the world he has grown up in. Unlike his
father, who is entirely focused on their survival, the boy is genuinely interested in
helping others. He cries repeatedly, often because of harm that has befallen somebody
else rather than out of fear for his own safety. Later, when the protagonists meet the
wanderer Ely, it is the boy who insists on sharing their food with him, though they
have almost nothing to spare. After the boy and his father have caught up with the
man who took their belongings, his father orders the thief to strip, but the boy
pleads for mercy. His father, in this scene, represents Old Testament morality: “I’m
going to leave you the way you left us” (276, cf. Leviticus 24:20). His son, instead,
urges New Testament love and forgiveness. The incident recalls the story of the thief
who was crucified next to Jesus, to whom Jesus says “To day shalt thou be with me
in paradise.”17 It may be that the thief in McCarthy’s novel, like the thief in the
Bible, recognizes the boy’s goodness: “The thief looked at the child and what he saw
was very sobering to him” (274). Despite his father’s frequent assertions that they
are, together, “the good guys”, it is really the boy alone who is truly good. It is immedi-
ately after they have left the thief that the novel’s clearest hint at the boy’s possible divi-
nity is made when he says “I am the one” (277).

16
Kunsa, 65; Kearney, 173–4. See also Søfting, 710–1.
17
Luke 23:43.
302 E. Pudney
The goodness of the boy is emphasized more subtly by his gift of extraordinary
vision. Darkness has descended on earth, recalling the blinding darkness described
in the epistle of John18. In the Gospel of St John, Jesus says “I am the light of the
world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of
life.”19 The boy is not blinded by the darkness of the world, because his innate good-
ness enables him to see clearly where others cannot. Early on in the book, the man sits
and looks at a valley through binoculars:

What do you see? The boy said.

Nothing.
He handed the binoculars across. The boy slung the strap over his neck and put them
to his eyes …
I see smoke, he said.
Where.
Past those buildings.
What buildings?
The boy handed the glasses back and he refocused them. The palest wisp. Yes, he
said. I see it. (82)

Not only can the boy see where others are blind, but his goodness is such that he can
help his father to see, too—both literally and metaphorically—throughout the book. It
is only because of the boy that his father does not walk in utter darkness. The boy’s
hearing also proves to be superior to his father’s (85), but it is his vision which is
repeatedly shown to be exceptional. In the house where they discover human livestock
locked in the cellar, it is the boy who sees the approaching cannibals (117). The man
mistakes his own reflection in a mirror for a threat, and is corrected by his son (139).
Although it is not completely clear because of the lack of attribution in the dialogue, it
seems to be the son who is better at finding their location on the map (208). After the
thief makes off with everything they have, the man sets his son what sounds like a very
difficult task—finding a few grains of sand in the road, which will indicate which way
the thief went. The boy achieves this almost immediately: “He’d not got far before the
boy called out. Here it is, Papa. They went this way … It was a half teaspoon of beach-
sand tilted from somewhere in the understructure of the grocery cart” (272). This dis-
covery, considering the speed with which it is made, seems not far short of miraculous.
The father explicitly recognizes his son’s extraordinary gift of vision earlier in the novel,
when they have found food in an abandoned house – an incredible piece of luck:

You cant see the house from the road.

We saw it.
You saw it. (221)

18
1 John 2:11.
19
John 8:12.
 Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 303

The man implies that the house literally cannot be seen from the road. Nonetheless,
the boy did see it, and this no longer strikes his father as odd. The boy’s father is only
able to maintain any kind of goodness, and any kind of life, because of the boy.
When the man looks at his son towards the end of the novel he sees this more
clearly than he ever has before, realizing that “when [the boy] moved the light
moved with him” (296).
Another indication of the boy’s goodness is his affinity with nature, which from a
Christian perspective is God’s creation. In the wood with the waterfall where they
find a small clump of morels that are somehow able to grow in the ruined earth,
the boy says “This is a good place, Papa” (41). Again, when his father finds some with-
ered apples and clean water, the boy tells him “you did good Papa” (131). These signs
of the possible survival of the natural world are greeted by the boy with more enthu-
siasm than the incredible discovery of the underground bunker, which contains “crate
upon crate of canned goods”. This the boy greets with some skepticism: “Why is this
here?” he asks, “Is it real?” (146–7). Part of the boy’s problem with eating canned goods
is that they belong, or once belonged, to somebody else. Despite being half-starved, he
is troubled by the idea of theft, and unprompted by his father says a kind of prayer of
thanks before he will eat (154–5).
As suggested above, the boy and his father are incredibly lucky, finding food where
there should be none left. It is clear that the events described in the novel take place
years after whatever cataclysmic event destroyed the world, because the boy’s
mother is still pregnant at the time of the initial disaster (54). Exactly how much
time has passed since then is not entirely clear, but judging by the boy’s maturity it
must be at least eight years. How much tinned food can there be left in the world
after such a long time? It is hard to believe that survival would be possible at all
without any form of agriculture. At one point in the novel the man wonders if there
could be a cow left alive somewhere, but dismisses the thought. Against this back-
ground, the discoveries of tinned food, vegetables in jars, and of course the bunker
packed with food and supplies, begin to stretch credulity.
It should not be concluded, however, that this is a defect in the novel. In fact, the
novel quietly acknowledges the improbability of their survival. When the man finds
food on a shipwreck, it “occurred to him that he took this windfall in a fashion danger-
ously close to matter of fact” (245). It seems he is so used to being lucky he has become
almost nonchalant about it. Later, as he is dying, he tells his son, “We were always
lucky. You’ll be lucky again. You’ll see” (297), and of course the man is right. After
his father’s death, the boy is lucky again, immediately meeting the “good guys” who
seemed not to exist at all up to that point. This might strain the reader’s suspension
of disbelief, which would ordinarily constitute a problem in a work of fiction. In
this particular case, however, it seems that implausibility is precisely the point.
Throughout the novel, almost everything has been seen from the man’s point of
view. Despite his son’s influence, he is to some extent a man whose eyes have been
blinded by the darkness. For this reason all that he sees has been described in terms
of action, practicalities, the grim reality of survival. This is all he is capable of
304 E. Pudney
seeing. Without his son, it seems certain that the man would have lost his humanity
completely:

There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob
uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he
thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any
way to think about at all. (137)

Despite his inability even to think about goodness, the man experiences an epiphany at
the end of his life. He suddenly declares that “Goodness will find the little boy. It always
has. It will again” (300). This conviction, it seems, is why the man ultimately decides
not to use the last bullet in his gun to kill his son. He has been grappling with this ques-
tion throughout the novel, asking himself, “Could you crush that beloved skull with a
rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing?” (120). But in the
end, he decides that he does not need to resort to what he has regarded as a terrible act
of mercy. The man’s realization that he need not kill his son resembles the story of
Abraham and Isaac, in which God commands Abraham to kill his son, only to reprieve
him at the last minute.20
Throughout the novel, it seems on the surface as though the man’s courage, ingenu-
ity and practical skills repeatedly save him and his son. But although this is at times
undeniably the case, there are hints that the boy’s goodness is what really counts.
How can the boy’s goodness ensure his survival? There is one hint prior to the
ending. Before the man dies, he is the focal point of the narration, except for one
brief scene. Early in the novel,

[t]he boy was sitting on the steps when he saw something move at the rear of the
house across the road. A face was looking at him. A boy, about his age, wrapped
in an outsized wool coat with the sleeves turned back. He stood up. He ran across
the road and up the drive. No one there. (88)

This is the only place in the book, before the man’s death, where the reader experiences
things from the boy’s point of view for more than the odd sentence, and there are two
ways to interpret what has happened. The first is that the boy is imagining things. This
is certainly what his father thinks: “There’s no little boy”, he says. Certainly the boy’s
intense loneliness makes this explanation plausible. But another possibility is that the
boy’s goodness has attracted another “good guy”, as it will do again at the end of the
novel. Before the man dies, this incident is mentioned again, and he seems to have
changed his mind about it:
Do you remember that little boy, Papa?
Yes. I remember him.
Do you think that he’s all right that little boy?
Oh yes. I think he’s all right. (300)

20
Gen. 22:1–12.
 Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 305

The man now believes in his son’s vision, because he has at last rediscovered his faith.
In keeping with the apocalyptic theme, the truth is revealed to him at the very end.
Do these signs of hope, and the boy’s discovery of other “good guys”, constitute a
happy ending? Up until this point, the other people that the boy and his father have
met on the road have all been either cannibals or burnt-out wrecks of human
beings. With the one possible exception, there have been no other children than the
boy. Suddenly the reader is expected to believe that a nuclear family—a man, a
woman and two children, a boy and a girl—have not only survived but are willing
and able to take on another mouth to feed. The details are left entirely mysterious.
We are told that these “good guys” do not eat people, but beyond that important nega-
tive, there is no clue as to how they get food. Can they be surviving on tinned food, as
the boy and his father have done? If so, they are relying on finite supplies which must
surely run out soon. What kind of future can there be for them? These questions, like
all the other mysteries of the book, are never resolved. Instead of providing a rational,
practical answer (the kind of answer the man has demanded all the way through the
novel), the reader is asked to accept on faith that the boy will survive, because he
deserves to. In other words, the reader is asked to make the same leap of faith as the
boy’s father has, despite the crushing weight of the evidence of all that has happened
so far. The novel does make this leap of faith possible for the reader as well as for the
father. It is at least conceivable that the boy will not only survive but will establish a
better life. The boy may even be the messiah, the bringer of a new world which, as
Ashley Kunsa argues,21 cannot yet be clearly seen. But the novel does not make such
a leap of faith easy—in fact, it goes to some lengths to make it difficult. The boy is
said to look at his father “from some unimaginable future, glowing like a tabernacle”
(293), and the future is indeed unimaginable. The question of what the protagonists
are surviving for and how things can possibly get better, which has been asked so
often and so urgently in the novel, remains unanswered.
There is always an alternative explanation to the Christian one. Perhaps the man’s
decision not to kill his son is not an act of faith after all, but a simple and understand-
able inability to do so. His son, in fact, asks to be “taken with him”, but the man says
that “I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant” (298). This
failure to face up to grim reality is exactly what his wife accuses him of before her
suicide. The boy’s divinity is likewise open to question. He has been described as a
“messiah” and a “golden chalice”, but at other times he is described in quite sinister
terms, as a “changeling child” (81) and a “troll” (222). He and his father are often
described in religious terms, for instance as “pilgrims” (1); but at other times they
are regarded as something much less holy: “street addicts”, for example (188).
Nothing in this world can be trusted or taken at face value—it has been made “a lie
every word” (79); “every day is a lie” (254). At one point the man sees his son as
“God’s own firedrake” (31). Since a drake is a dragon, like the one that in the book

21
Kunsa, 65.
306 E. Pudney
of Revelation makes war in heaven against Michael and his angels,22 this is a confusing
image. There are plenty of other signs of ambiguity in the novel. Clearly, the snakes
referred to earlier are an ambiguous symbol, representing evil to the men who burn
them but in fact constituting an innocent part of the natural world. The pregnant
woman who appears towards the end of the book might seem to symbolize hope for
the future, but turns out to do no such thing. The description of the man’s wife as a
“creation perfectly evolved to meet its own end” (60–1) refers, intriguingly, to both
creation and evolution. These two concepts, while not necessarily mutually exclusive,
are widely perceived in our own time to be in tension with one another. The close jux-
taposition of the two terms suggests the possibility of two contradictory readings: either
the man’s wife was created by God, or she was the product of blind natural processes.
One of the most puzzling aspects of the novel is the encounter with the wanderer
who calls himself Ely. Ely seems marked out as significant for various reasons: for
one thing, he is the only character in the novel that is given a name. Critics have men-
tioned the prophet Elijah in relation to Ely;23 but he bears greater resemblance to Eli,
the priest of Shiloh in 1 Samuel. Apart from the closer similarity in names, Ely men-
tions that he “cant see good” and says he is ninety when asked his age (177). These
details link him to Eli, who “was ninety and eight years old; and his eyes were dim,
that he could not see”.24
Eli is an ambiguous character in the Bible. He is a virtuous man himself, but is pun-
ished by God for his failure to stop his sons from sinning:

And the LORD said to Samuel, Behold, I will do a thing in Israel, at which both the
ears of every one that heareth it shall tingle. In that day I will perform against Eli all
things which I have spoken concerning his house: when I begin, I will also make an
end. For I have told him that I will judge his house for ever for the iniquity which he
knoweth; because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.25

Seen in the light of this passage, Ely in The Road may be regarded as a good man who
failed to do anything to halt the decline of the world and is thus complicit in its down-
fall. However, there is more to the biblical Eli than this. He is responsible for the care of
the prophet and future leader of Israel, Samuel. This suggests that the boy, like Samuel,
is a future leader of the remaining “good guys”, and may be destined to drive out the
“bad guys”—as Samuel leads the Israelite army which slaughters the Philistines in the
Bible. The novel has already given readers a glimpse of what the Philistines might look
like, when the man and his son hide from

[a]n army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather
wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. Some of the pipes were threaded through with
lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon. They clanked

22
Rev. 12:7.
23
See, for example, Grindley, 12, Kunsa, 70n13.
24
1 Sam 4:15.
25
Ibid., 3:11–13.
 Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 307

past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. Bearded, their breath smoking
through their masks. (96)

The fearsome appearance and primitive equipment of this “army” is suggestive of the
ancient world of the Old Testament, and the man confirms to his son that these are
“the bad guys”. If Ely is read as representing the biblical Eli, then, his presence supports
the boy’s purported holiness and future status as prophet.
If Ely is seen as the prophet Elijah instead, things look rather different. The novel
does hint that Ely could be a prophet: “I knew this was coming”, he claims (179).
Elijah’s role in the Bible bears closer consideration. Elijah confronts and defeats the
prophets of Baal, exposing them as idolatrous followers of a false God.26 This biblical
passage sheds light on the following exchange between Ely and the man:

What if I said that he’s a god?

The old man shook his head. I’m past all that now. Have been for years. Where men
cant live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone. So I hope that’s not
true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible
thing so I hope it’s not true. Things will be better when everybody’s gone. (183)

As Graulund points out,27 the man describes his son as a god, not the God. Ely could
therefore be argued to fulfil the same function as the prophet Elijah: he dismisses the
man’s idolatry of his son, denying the boy’s alleged holiness and revealing him to be a
false god. Ely also says that he is “past all that now”—the time for prophecy is over. He
suggests that regardless of whether the boy is a god or not, it will make no difference:
this ending is one that cannot be survived even by gods.
These are not the only possible views of Ely—an entirely secular interpretation is also
possible and coherent. Ely comments that “[p]eople were always getting ready for
tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didnt
even know they were there” (179). Here Ely again raises the frightening prospect of
a blind, indifferent universe, a future unplanned by any divine power, a world that
is the result of pure chance and is ungoverned by any laws beyond those of brute
physics. The ultimate cruelty of the world is that, as Ely says, “[n]obody wants to be
here and nobody wants to leave” (180). There is nothing worth living for, nothing
left to enjoy in the world, but the blind instinct to survive remains, forcing people
to continue lives of pure suffering. Like the man’s long-dead wife, Ely speaks wistfully
about a personified death—perhaps a kind of god, but one whose “days will be num-
bered too” (184), and who bears no resemblance to Christian ideals. When Ely is asked
if he wishes he had never been born, he replies that “[b]eggars cant be choosers” (180).
This is a concise restatement of the wisdom of Silenus, a mythical companion to the
wine god Dionysus, whose encounter with King Midas is recounted in another of
Nietzsche’s works:

26
1 Kings 18:17–40.
27
Graulund, 76.
308 E. Pudney
[Midas] asked him what was the best and most desirable thing of all for mankind.
The daemon … spoke these words, “Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard
and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful
for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your
grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you
—is to die soon.”28

Ely expresses a similar view to that of Silenus, telling the man that things will be better
for everyone when everyone has died (183).
The most powerful expression of doubt in the novel comes, appropriately enough in
a work so concerned with the apocalyptic, at the end. While the boy seems to have
found safety and a new family, some critics have suggested that this apparently
hopeful ending may be deceptive. Lincoln, for example, points out that “the boy
still has one bullet left in the nickelplated pistol”.29 There would, perhaps, be greater
grounds for an optimistic reading if the novel’s ending remained focused on the
boy, but it does not. Instead, this much-discussed passage concludes the story:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains … Polished and mus-
cular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the
world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not
be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than
man and they hummed of mystery (306–7).

Kunsa rightly points out that this ending, like the biblical end of time, “harkens back to
a beginning”;30 but this aside it is hard to accept his wider claim that this is an “opti-
mistic” novel. McCarthy insists that the natural world, apparently destroyed by
mankind, cannot be made right again. The ending yearns for the beginning but
rules out any hope of a new one. The final sentence downgrades the importance of
the human world and shows us a universe in which we are not the centre, and in
which our passing may not after all be the ultimate tragedy.
The Road is open to both hopeful and despairing interpretations. These contradic-
tory interpretations bear close resemblance to the man’s conflicting thoughts about
God and the status of his son. Walsh summarizes the three possibilities succinctly in
saying that the boy “is God’s word, the last god, or ‘God never spoke’”.31 The cata-
strophe that has befallen the earth could be the prelude to a new beginning which
will be brought about by the man’s holy son. Or the boy could be doomed, despite
his holiness: this ending might be too final even for a god to survive. The bleakest
reading is that the holiness of the boy could be a lie that the man has been telling
himself to help keep them both alive. McCarthy’s novel is not merely ambiguous in
the sense of leaving a blank space which must be filled in by the reader. Instead, The

28
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 22.
29
Lincoln, 173.
30
Kunsa, 67.
31
Walsh, 344.
 Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 309

Road actively and forcefully pushes these multiple, mutually exclusive interpretations
upon the reader.
These conflicting interpretations are couched in equally powerful language, and they
are given equal weight, but while the Judeo-Christian interpretation is not made more
persuasive than the atheistic view, it must be regarded as more optimistic. Throughout
the novel, atheism is associated with despair, hopelessness and death, and Christianity
with the rare moments of hope. In the final analysis, The Road can also be understood
as a challenge to the atheistic view of the universe, and this challenge is one that any
atheist ought to take seriously. The novel does not say that atheism is factually incor-
rect, but asks the atheist to consider how he or she could possibly continue living in a
world stripped of all comfort. Faith and hope may be almost impossibly difficult to
maintain in such a world, but the alternative, as represented by Ely and the man’s
wife, is the will-to-death. If one wishes to maintain that human life is inherently valu-
able, as most atheists presumably would, what acts as a guarantee of such value in the
absence of divine will? To that question, as to so many others in the novel, there can be
no easy answers.

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