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God, Morality, and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Erik J. Wielenberg
ormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is, among other things, a meditation on morality, what makes human life meaningful, and the relationship between these things and God. While the novel is rife with religious imagery and ideas, it suggests a conception of morality and meaning that is secular in nature. In this paper I show that while the existence of God remains ambiguous throughout the novel, The Road contains both a clear moral code and a view about what makes life meaningful. I describe this moral code and examine its connection with meaning in life. Along the way, I discuss the struggle of the man and child to live up to the moral code. I then make the case that the views of morality and meaning found in The Road imply that morality does not depend upon God for its existence or justification. Through this discussion, I hope to deepen our understanding both of morality and of The Road.
God’s Ambiguity and the Man’s Mission
The first words spoken aloud by the man in The Road are: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke
Many events in the novel can be interpreted in accordance with both possibilities. Consider, for example, the pattern of near demise followed by unlikely rescue that repeats itself throughout the story. The father and son are on the point of starvation when they discover an underground bunker filled with food (McCarthy 138). Later, facing death by starvation once again, the boy spots a house in the distance, and the house turns out to have food in it (202). Still later, the man finds a flare gun on an abandoned sailboat—a gun that is crucial in a later encounter (240). And, of course, there is the boy’s encounter with the shotgun-toting veteran after the death of his father (281). Are these events little miracles—the hand of God reaching into the burned-out hellscape to protect the child—or are they just strokes of good fortune? The answer to this question remains unclear. There are hints of divine activity, but they are never more than hints. For instance, the name of the abandoned sailboat is “Pajaro de Esperanza”—bird of hope. The bird of hope is the dove. In the Old Testament, a dove carrying an olive leaf signals to Noah that the waters of the flood are receding (Genesis 8:11). But the sailboat named after the dove brings a message of despair; it originates from Tenerife, a Spanish island off the coast of Africa. It brings the message that the catastrophe that constitutes the backdrop of The Road is worldwide.
” (McCarthy 5). This statement introduces a fundamental ambiguity that runs throughout the novel. The man does not declare his son to be the word of God; instead, his utterance is hypothetical in nature. He declares that his son is the word of God or God never spoke. The book of Genesis depicts God as creating through speech (Genesis 1:1-31); a God that does not speak is a God that does not create. Thus, the man’s declaration is that either his son is the word of God, or, for all practical purposes, the universe is a godless one.
A particularly tantalizing illustration of this ambiguity is the father and son’s encounter with an old man who may or may not be named “Ely” (McCarthy 161). This character resembles the Old Testament prophet Elijah in certain ways (see Snyder 81).
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Elijah predicted a drought (1 Kings 17:1); Ely says he knew that the catastrophe (or something like it) was coming—“I always believed in it” (McCarthy 168). Ely wonders about being the last person left alive: “Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?” (169). Elijah tells God that “the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away ” (1 Kings 19:10, emphasis added). Elijah wanders in the wilderness and is given food by God, who delivers the food by way of ravens (1 Kings 17:5-7); Ely is fed by the boy and possibly mistakes him for an angel (McCarthy 172). In the book of Malachi, the final book of the Old Testament, Malachi foretells a day of judgment, a day “burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day … will leave them neither root nor branch” (Malachi 4:1). Malachi declares that God will send Elijah in advance of this fiery day of judgment. The book of Malachi—and the Old Testament itself—ends like this:
Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse. (Malachi 4:5-6)
The mysterious catastrophe of The Road is biblical in scope and it involves fire— a lot of fire. And it has obviously turned the hearts of the man and the child to each other. These hints suggest that perhaps Ely is a prophet who predicted the catastrophe of The Road and preceded the child, who is the word of God. On the other hand, Ely has lost his faith: “I’m past all that now. Have been for years. Where men cant live gods fare no better” (McCarthy 172). He also denies that his name is “Ely” (171). Strikingly, Ely simultaneously denies the existence of God and declares himself to be a prophet in a single paradoxical sentence: “There is no God and we are his prophets” (170). These aspects of Ely point toward the possibility that God never spoke. This old man has survived not through divine assistance but rather through random chance; he and all the other survivors of the catastrophe are prophets of atheism, bearing witness to the absence of God from the universe. The uncertainty about God’s presence exists not just in the universe of The Road but also in the mind of the man. At times he tries to convince the child, and possibly himself, that God is still at work in the world: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God” (77). On an earlier occasion, kneeling Job-like in ashes (Job 2:8), the man expresses doubt about God’s existence: “Are you there? … Will I see you at the last?”^1
The man’s predicament illustrates the following paradox. Great suffering appears to constitute evidence against the existence of a loving God, but it also has the capacity to
Like the man, Job goes about “in sunless gloom” (Job 30:28); unlike the man, Job possesses unwavering faith: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth … then in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:25-27). Job asks God: “Do you have eyes of flesh?” (Job 10:4). The man wonders: “Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul?” (McCarthy 11-2). The man’s last remark is reminiscent of the advice given to Job by his wife: “Curse God and die” (Job 2:9). Indeed, the man recalls this advice himself later (McCarthy 114).
man and the child. At the very least, the two struggle to maintain civilization between themselves. Carrying the fire is not easy. In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humanity. As punishment for the theft, Prometheus is tied to a rock. Each day, a giant eagle eats his liver. But Prometheus does not die. Instead, his liver re- grows and is eaten again the following day. Because Prometheus carried the fire to humanity, his days are filled with suffering. This is not unlike the situation of the man and the child. Just before he dies, the man tells the child that he has been the one carrying the fire the entire time: “It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it” (279). The man says this to try to convince the child not to give up, to keep going down the road. Perhaps the notion of carrying the fire is just a crude myth adopted by the two to keep themselves going, and the man tries to use the myth to inspire the child not to give up after he dies. But perhaps there is more to it than this. Carrying the fire and being a good guy are closely related: only good guys carry the fire. Before he dies, the man also tells the child: “You’re the best guy. You always were” (279). Prior to this point, the man has always maintained that they are the good guys and that they are carrying the fire. As he is dying, the man seems to be saying that the child is the true good guy. What are we to make of this? To answer this question, we must consider what it means to be a “good guy” in the world of The Road.
The Code of the Good Guys
The philosopher Immanuel Kant maintained that all of our moral duties boil down to one fundamental principle, which he called “the Categorical Imperative”: always respect the intrinsic worth of rational beings (Kant, Grounding 36; Virtue 97).
In the world of The Road , there is a simple rule for distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys. Bad guys eat people; good guys don’t. This is what remains of the Categorical Imperative: don’t treat people as mere food. While this is the most obvious principle to which good guys are committed, it is not the only one. It is possible to discern in The Road a Code of the Good Guys, a set of principles to which good guys are committed. That Code includes the following rules:
The basis of Kantian moral philosophy is that there is an important distinction between persons and mere things. Things are valuable only as tools; when they no longer serve your purposes, you are free to discard them. Persons, however, have an intrinsic worth that must always be valued and respected.
- Don’t eat people.
- Don’t steal.
- Don’t lie.
- Keep your promises.
- Help others.
- Never give up.
The man tries to teach these principles to the child and he tries to follow them himself. Throughout the novel we witness the man’s struggle to be a good guy, to do
what is right in a world in which most people seem to have abandoned morality altogether. One confounding factor in this struggle is that at least some of these moral principles admit of exceptions. At least some of these principles are rules-of-thumb that hold only for the most part. Early in the novel, the man and the child encounter a man who has recently been struck by lightning and is clearly at the point of death. The child wants to help him, but the man refuses. He explains his actions to the child this way: “We have no way to help him. I’m sorry for what happened to him but we cant fix it” (McCarthy 50). Later he tells the child: “He’s going to die. We cant share what we have or we’ll die too” (52). Under the circumstances, the man’s actions may be justified. But there is a danger lurking here. The danger is that engaging in justified violations of the code of the good guys can make unjustified violations more likely; a slippery slope lurks. Kant warned against precisely this danger:
Hereby arises ... a propensity to quibble with these strict laws of duty, to cast doubt upon their validity, or at least upon their purity and strictness, and to make them, where possible, more compatible with our wishes and inclinations. Thereby are such laws corrupted in their very foundations and their whole dignity is destroyed. (Kant, Grounding 17)
The man sometimes breaks his promises to the child. For example, at one point he pretends he has split a half-packet of cocoa between the two of them when in reality he has given it all to the boy, something he has previously promised not to do. The boy scolds him: “If you break little promises, you’ll break big ones. That’s what you said” (McCarthy 34). This is Kant’s slippery-slope worry. Breaking a promise in order to give the child all of the cocoa may be permissible, but the worry is that it will lead to impermissible promise-breaking. The man acknowledges the danger but tries to reassure the boy: “I know. But I wont [break big promises]” (34). The man’s most important promise to the child is that he will never leave him, even in death. When the man is at the point of death, the child begs his father to kill him: “Just take me with you. Please” (279). When it comes right down to it, the father finds himself unable to fulfill the child’s request: “I cant. I cant hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I cant” (279). However, he finds another way to keep this promise. He tells his son that they will be able to talk to each other even after he dies, as long as the son practices: “You’ll have to make it like talk that you imagine” (279). After the father dies, the child promises to talk to him every day and he keeps this promise: “[T]he best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget” (286). The child’s promise to talk to his father every day and the father’s promise never to leave the child are intertwined; by keeping his own promise, the child enables the father to keep his. Thus, while the man doesn’t keep all of his promises, he does keep his biggest promise. The man also struggles when it comes to helping others. He is suspicious and distrustful of others. He is reluctant to share what little food they have. The child, by contrast, typically tries to reach out to other people and help them. Thus, the encounter with the lightning victim illustrates a dynamic that is repeated throughout the novel. The child often seems to function as the man’s conscience in this regard. When the man helps
In the flashback, the three travelers are followed by a dog. The man clearly wants to catch it and kill it for food. The wife walks away down the road because she does not want to watch the man kill the dog. The child realizes what is happening and begs the man not to kill he dog. The next day the dog is gone. What happened to it? The answer, I suggest, is that the man used the third bullet to kill the dog for food. In so doing, he breaks his promise to the child not to hurt the dog. Here is an argument for this interpretation. In the world of The Road , there are three main uses for a bullet: suicide, self-defense, and killing for food. We know that the third bullet was not used for suicide; the wife accomplishes her suicide by using a “flake of obsidian” (58). There is evidence that the third bullet was not used for self-defense either. After the man uses the second bullet to kill the roadrat who menaces the child with a knife, he tells the child: “You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again” (77). This suggests that the encounter with the roadrat constitutes the first use of a bullet for self-defense. Finally, when the man and child initially enter the town and hear a dog barking in the distance, the child immediately asks: “We’re not going to kill it, are we Papa?” (82). This hints that the child remembers the earlier occasion when they did kill and eat a dog—despite the man’s promise not to hurt the dog. As I suggested earlier, part of the man’s struggle to be a good guy stems from the slippery-slope problem: sometimes it is morally permissible to violate the code of the good guys, but recognizing this can lead one into impermissible violations. A second confounding factor in the man’s struggle to be a good guy is suggested by something he tells the child after he leaves the thief to die: “I’m scared. ... Do you understand? I’m scared” (259). Even when you know what the right thing to do is, it is often difficult to get yourself to do it. The man knows the code of the good guys. He tries to live up to it; he does not always succeed. Does this mean that the man is not really a good guy after all? I suggest that reflection on this question suggests that the idea that people are divided into good guys, who always do what morality requires, and bad guys, who never do what morality requires, is an oversimplification. Reality is more complex than this. However, there is an important distinction to be made between those who care about doing the right thing and those who do not. The man is a good guy in that he cares about doing the right thing. Because we are human, having a commitment to moral principles does not mean that we will always live up to those principles. Among those who have such a commitment, some will have greater success than others in living up their principles. The man believes in morality; he tells the child “stories of courage and justice” (41). He tells the child stories in which they help others. The child complains that “[t]hose stories are not true” (268), but the fact that the man tells such stories is nevertheless significant. The stories we tell reflect our ideals. Bad guys do not tell stories like this, and they do not weep at the loss of beauty and goodness (129). Bad guys are not people who strive to be moral and fail; they are people who have ceased to care about morality altogether. They care only about survival and will do anything to attain it. They live without restraint, without principles at all: “My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh” (75). Socrates suggested that what is important is “not [merely] life, but the good [i.e. just] life” (Plato 48b). Good guys accept this Socratic view and strive to live in accordance with it; bad guys care only about
living, not about how they live. In the world of The Road , this means that they will even eat their own children in order to survive. In one of the more disturbing episodes in The Road , the man and the child come across a decapitated baby roasting on a spit (McCarthy 198). They are nearly out of food when they make this find. Horrifying as it is to contemplate, the fact is that the baby constitutes food. Others killed and cooked the baby; not eating it is not going to bring it back to life. But there is never any question that they will not eat the baby; they are good guys, and good guys don’t eat people –” [n]o matter what ” (128). The man struggles to do what he knows is right. Like many of us, he is a flawed good guy. He does not keep all of his promises, but he keeps his biggest promise. He won’t eat people, no matter what. He never gives up. Still, he does possess an important flaw. The man has been damaged by his horrific experiences. He has lost the capacity to trust and make connections with others. Early on we are told that the man and the child are “each the other’s world entire” (6). The man no longer has the capacity to expand his world beyond the child; the child, by contrast, does have this ability. This difference between the two explains the recurring conflict between them over helping others. The child is naturally inclined to reach out, to try to make connections with other people, while the man’s first instinct is to distrust and avoid others. As the man is dying, he gives the child the following instructions: “You need to find the good guys but you cant take any chances. No chances. Do you hear?” (278). It is impossible to follow these instructions; there is no way to connect with other good guys without taking some sort of chance. When the child encounters the veteran after the death of his father, he asks him how he knows he is one of the good guys. The man responds: “You dont. You’ll have to take a shot” (283). The child takes a chance, disobeying his father’s instructions, and as a result is able to connect with another family. The man’s flawed instructions arise from his inability to trust others. This flaw has an important implication for the child—the child is unable to connect with other good guys as long as his father is alive. There are hints that the veteran (and perhaps his family) have been following the man and the child for a long time, but were reluctant to approach while the man was still alive. For example, recall the veteran’s first question to the child: “Where’s the man you were with?” (282). Had the veteran approached while the man was still alive, the man would have done everything he could to avoid interacting with the veteran. The man knows that things are hopeless for the child unless he can connect with other good guys, yet this cannot happen until the man has died. The most important function of parents is to enable their children to flourish in an independent way. Because the man is damaged, he is unable to fulfill this function completely. He can truly succeed as a parent only by dying. The man recognizes this difference between himself and the child; he is broken and knows it. He worries not just about the survival of the child, but about the survival of the goodness within the child: “But when he bent to see into the boy’s face under the hood of the blanket he very much feared that something was gone that could not be put right again” (136). When he tells the boy that he is the one carrying the fire, that he is “the best guy” (279), he is indicating that the child has a crucial ability that he has lost. Only a good guy who has the ability to make connections with other people, to enter or help form a community, truly carries the fire. The child has this ability. This is why the
The answer is that, despite (or perhaps partly owing to) the absence of verbal communication between them, the man and his uncle spend the day sharing a deep connection with each other. They are working together in a common task; the uncle is sharing his knowledge with the man, and the man is learning from his uncle. This is what makes the day perfect, and this is what provides human lives—both in the world of The Road and in our world—with meaning: connections with other people. In a word, the point of it all is love. Despite the many horrors the man and the child face, they also share a deep connection. This deep connection provides their lives with meaning and value amidst all their suffering. It is the existence of this relationship that makes it worth continuing the struggle. Every day is not a lie; every day is a victory, a day in which more meaning and value is won: “The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. … So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you” (54). Many of the days the man and child spend together have the same essential structure as the perfect day of the man’s childhood. They spend their days working together toward a common goal, the man sharing his knowledge, the child learning from the man, the two of them sharing a deep connection. It is surely no accident that the “perfect day” is spent in a quest for firewood—the same quest that occupies the man and child in most of their days together on the road. The motives underlying the wife’s suicide are not as straightforward as they may initially appear. Some of her remarks suggest that she favors suicide because it is the lesser of two possible evils, the other evil being raped, murdered, and eaten. But there are hints of another kind of motivation for her suicide: that she has lost her connection with the man and the child. When the man tells her that he would never leave her, she says that she doesn’t care and describes herself as a “faithless slut” (57). She declares:
My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so dont ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you’ll be good at it. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. 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. (57)
These lines suggest that the wife no longer feels sorrow. There is also an indication that she does not believe in the man; she says that she doubts that he will be good at caring for the child. Earlier, she tells him: “You cant protect us” (56). She says that she has “come this far” only because she was surviving for other people; the fact that she no longer wishes to live suggests that she no longer cares about those people. If this interpretation is correct, it raises a question. What is the cause of the rift between the wife and the rest of the family? Perhaps it stems in part from the fact that she has seen the man break his promises, for example his promise to the child not to kill the dog. Another clue is found in a flashback that describes the birth of the child. We are told that during the child’s birth, “[h]er [the wife’s] cries meant nothing to him” (57). Perhaps the man’s focus on caring for his son has caused him to neglect his wife. In any case, there are clear indications that she has lost her faith in him, and at least hints that she has lost her
connection with both the man and the child. This explains the man’s guilt over her death: “He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark” (32). The absence of connections with others is the real threat to meaning and value; the source of meaning and value is love. The greatest fear of the man and the child is not death, but rather being alone. It is telling that the wife goes off by herself to commit suicide. Her death does not sever her connections with others; rather, it frees her from an existence in which all such connections have already been severed. Again, what is true in the world of the novel is true of our world as well: the best predictor of suicide is social isolation. Some philosophers maintain that the non-existence of God would render all human lives meaningless, regardless of the circumstances of the world. For instance, the contemporary Christian philosopher William Craig writes:
If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. ... The contributions of the scientist to the advance of human knowledge, the researches of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good men everywhere to better the lot of the human race—all these come to nothing. In the end they don’t make one bit of difference, not one bit. Each person’s life is therefore without ultimate significance. And because our lives are ultimately meaningless, the activities we fill our lives with are also meaningless. The long hours spent in study at the university, our jobs, or interests, our friendships—all these are, in the final analysis, utterly meaningless. This is the horror of modern man: because he ends in nothing, he is nothing. (Craig 58-9)
We have seen that it is unclear whether God is present in the world of The Road. In Craig’s mind, everything hangs on the resolution of this issue. If God did not speak, then the struggles of the man and the child are pointless and their lives meaningless—and the same is true of our lives and struggles. This is powerful stuff. If Craig is right, we had better hope that God exists. But Craig’s reasoning is flawed. In Craig’s terminology, for an activity to have ultimate meaning or significance, that activity must make a difference in how things turn out in the end—the very end. Without God, no human activity can affect the final state of the universe, and so all of our activities lack what Craig labels “ultimate meaning.” From this he infers that all of our activities are meaningless. But this simply does not follow. The crucial slide occurs in this sentence: “And because our lives are ultimately meaningless, the activities we fill our lives with are also meaningless.” What Craig is saying in that sentence is that any activity that does not influence how things turn out in the very end is entirely meaningless. Craig’s mistake is to overlook the fact that some activities carry value and meaning within themselves; their meaning is not derived merely from the ultimate effect they produce. The Road points us toward such an activity: sharing deep connections with other human beings. It is clear early on in the novel that the father’s days are numbered. Yet each day that the man and the child spend together contains value and meaning,
sky. But after the catastrophe, looking at the sky is pointless; the habit no longer makes sense. The paragraph quoted above raises the worry that the habit of looking to moral principles for guidance is similarly pointless. Before the catastrophe, such a practice would have made sense; after the catastrophe, looking to morality for guidance is as senseless as looking to the sky for guidance. This worry is in turn connected to one of the oldest questions in moral philosophy: why be moral? What reason do we have to struggle to be good guys? Some believe that there is a reason to be moral only if God exists. William Craig, for example, declares that “[i]f life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether on has lived as a Stalin or as a saint. ... [Y]ou may as well just live as you please” (Craig 60-1). Craig assumes that all reasons are self-interested reasons. He assumes that we have a reason to care about morality only if there is something in it for us. But another possibility is that there are moral reasons. Consider the first principle of the good guys in The Road : don’t eat people. A perfectly good reason to refrain from killing and eating people is that such an act inflicts a horrifying experience on its victim. The same things that make actions right or wrong in the first place also constitute reasons to perform (or refrain from performing) those actions. Still, if self-interested reasons to care about morality in a godless universe are desired, such reasons exist. In The Road , whenever the man strays from the path of the good guys, the child stops speaking to him for a while. This is particularly evident in cases of failures to help others. Each moral transgression by the man weakens, at least temporarily, the connection between the two. Since it is precisely this relationship that sustains the man, giving his life meaning, he has a straightforward, self-interested reason to do his best to be a good guy. Being a good guy draws him closer to his son; failing to be a good guy separates him from his son (and, if the child is the word of God, moral transgressions separate the man from God). One reviewer of The Road wrote that the novel gives us “redemption in the form of the love between a parent and a child—their desire to be good although it serves no purpose” (Egan).
More generally, a self-interested reason to care about morality in a godless universe is that being moral enables us to have meaningful connections with other people, whereas moral transgressions tend to isolate us from each other. Extreme immorality may produce substantial material benefits; however, the cost of such immorality—even when undetected—is isolation. It is interesting that Craig specifically mentions Stalin: “If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether on has lived as a Stalin or as a saint” (Craig 60-1).
But the man and child’s desire to be good does serve a purpose: only those who strive to be moral are capable of the sort of love the two share. The desire to be good makes the redemption possible.
Consider this account of Stalin toward the end of his life:
His bitterness, paranoia and fear make it hard to imagine anyone else wanting to be Stalin. He as described as ‘sickly, suspicious’ by Khrushchev, who wrote, ‘He could look at a man and say, “Why are your eyes so shifty today?” or “Why are you turning so much today and avoiding looking me directly in the eyes?” … Khrushchev noticed how terribly lonely he was, and how he needed people round him all the time: ‘When he woke up in the morning, he would immediately summon us, either inviting us to the movies or starting some conversation which could
have been finished in two minutes but was stretched out so that we could stay with him longer.” (Glover 250)
The cannibals of The Road may survive, but they have paid a heavy price for doing so. By turning their back on morality, they have cut themselves off from genuine human connections forever. After he is killed by the man, the roadrat who menaces the child with a knife is cooked and eaten by his traveling companions (McCarthy 71). The humans that constitute these packs of cannibals may not be alone in a physical sense, but they are alone in a much deeper sense. I mentioned earlier that Kant suggested that the foundation of morality is the recognition that persons are different from mere things in that the former have an intrinsic worth and dignity that should be respected at all times. The Road teaches us the cost of ignoring this distinction: by treating other people as mere things, one risks becoming a mere thing oneself, a thing like the toy penguin in the boy’s dream, a thing that keeps going, but for no good reason. If God spoke, then to turn one’s back on morality is to risk alienating oneself from God. A good reason to be moral is to bring oneself closer to God. In a godless universe, to turn one’s back on morality is to risk alienating oneself from the rest of humanity. The Stalins and Bernie Madoffs of this world are destined for one sort of hell or another; the only question is whether that hell will be temporary or everlasting. In any event, it is manifestly false to claim that if God does not exist, then it makes no difference how we live. The fundamental ambiguity of God’s existence remains unresolved in The Road. One of the lessons of the novel is that the answer to the question of whether God exists is not as important is it is often taken to be. In particular, the question is far less relevant to morality and meaning than many believe. The Code of the Good Guys is straightforward, easily recognized, and universal. It does not belong exclusively to any particular religious tradition. God or no God, the most valuable thing in this world is love, and a good reason to struggle to be moral is that doing so is the only way to attain genuine love. The cost of immorality is, ultimately, loneliness. According to Christianity, the most important commandment of all is to love God with all of your heart. Neither the man nor the child fulfills this commandment. The novel opens with the man wondering whether he will have an opportunity to throttle God by the neck and cursing Him (11-2). It ends with the child choosing to talk to the man rather than God (286). By the standards of Christian morality, neither the man nor the child does particularly well. The proper conclusion to draw from this is that Christian morality is flawed. At one point Ely suggests that perhaps the child believes in God. The man replies that he does not know what the child believes in (174). The answer to Ely’s question is that the child believes in humanity. By struggling to be a good guy and keeping his big promise, the man manages to keep the child’s faith in humanity alive. This faith in humanity enables the child to trust the veteran, which in turn allows him to attain salvation—earthly salvation, in the form of meaningful connections with other human beings.^3
Works Cited
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Egan, Jennifer. “Men at Work: The Literary Masculinity of Cormac McCarthy.” Slate Magazine. October 10, 2006 [http://www.slate.com/id/2151300/]. Accessed 2/21/11.
Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals , 3rd^ edition. Trans. James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993.
Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue: Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. J. Ellington. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964.
Lewis, Clive Staples. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
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