Perspective 1: A Critique of Compassion
Despite the obvious light that cuts through the darkness of a post-apocalyptic world in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, one should not assume goodness on the basis of appearance. Fire, the light of humanity, is often construed as the good, simply because of humanity’s pride, the unwillingness to let anything tarnish the greatness that is man. But, so obvious, before our eyes, yet hidden beneath the clamor of our ethos, is the danger of fire; its ability to burn. McCarthy’s The Road is an affront on the modern societal drive towards compassion and the appeasement of suffering, held in such high esteem by the remnant of humanity, and society as it is.
First and foremost, it is prudent to dispel any murmur of infinity. Society will not last forever, nor will humanity. McCarthy realizes this, as most do, and demonstrates his knowledge. “The End” are much more than just words to McCarthy, and perhaps why he does not include this finalizing phrase upon completion of his novel. McCarthy acknowledges that, despite the “end” of a tale, the end has already come – at least in his fiction. However, this fictional concept transcends the role of a pleasing novel, and comes to mean much more, tangibly. Despite the brief image of a world in flames, there is no depiction of the world as it is today (in reality) in his fictional world. McCarthy demonstrates that there will be no infinite reign supreme of the human race, and that, despite the lasting effect of our ego, our supremacy as humans, “Rome will fall.”
Having accepted that society will collapse at some point, some time, McCarthy moves on to examine what will happen to society itself at this time of rapture. However, before deciding what can happen to society, McCarthy must force us to understand what this “society” is. Society is not a collection of people, nor is it a culture of people. No, indeed, it is much more than that. As much as one can give it a definition, society is a mentality, a construct of what it means to be human. McCarthy cannot simply state this, though, as to do so would be to end the persuasive element of his work. Through the child in the story, the lasting “hope” of humanity, McCarthy embodies what it means to be human by idolizing the child: kind, compassionate, helpful. In short, weak.
However, when left with a society that is just that, existent in only one, is it still justifiable to name that society? McCarthy argues yes. However, with only one embodiment of the ideal human, it becomes less persuasive; the drive to idolize that one becomes less and less desirable. Society is split: the good, and the bad. In the father’s statement, “maybe,” maybe there are others like them, McCarthy shows the assumption of good, of humanity. In Armageddon, the construct of “good” that McCarthy shows to be nothing more than an impulsive drive to be more like the rest of one’s peers, is shattered.
Left with shreds of what it once meant to be human, McCarthy shows his hand, displaying the negative aspects of what was once thought to be so ideal: compassion. The boy reaches out to help fellow humans, to save them from, say, a slaughter house, a trapdoor in a house, and he is chased into the woods. He reaches out to help an old man on the street, and he is threatened. He runs to his fellow man in search of aid, and, though they have abundant supply of resources on a truck, he is nearly killed with a bullet to the brain. He reaches out to give or take compassion, he reaches toward the spark, the kindling of what it meant to be human, and he is scorched.
But what, then, is it to be human, to be “good”? Why must this drive to help, the drive to be kind, the drive to be moral, why does it hurt so? Indeed, McCarthy leaves us on the edges of our seats with these questions, we, the readers, begging to have our visions shattered once more. McCarthy’s answer is simple: it is nothing. The concept of “human,” of “good,” means nothing to an enlightened scholar like McCarthy, as he realizes that this compassion, this “humanity,” is nothing more than what we are taught when we are young. In youth, demonstrated by the boy, what we know comes from who we trust. Though there is nearly no compassion in the father, no spark, the boy lived in a time where there were once “humans,” those billions of compassionate persons, not seeing what evil they bred amongst themselves. The boy is taught to be a “good person,” while those raised in this literal “hell” on earth are taught to survive. And in the end, is that not what humanity is: survival.
Thus, as the concept of “good” is originated from humanity, what happens when humanity disappears? For that is McCarthy’s true apocalypse: the end of humanity, and with it, the death of “good.” “Humans are dead, and we have killed them.”; this might be the battle-cry of the bloodcults, those half-human manifestations of the boy’s “evil.” However, this phrase is more than that – it is the realization that man is not what we are, but what we think we are. “Man,” the benevolent, compassionate, chivalrous hero of our youth, is not who we are. We are no more than molecules, bound by mysterious forces, infused with this energy we hold so precious: “life.” And our lives are similar: they are a collective struggle to retain our own consciousness, our own life – survival. But other than that, McCarthy shows, we are what we make ourselves.
However – as McCarthy clearly incites rebellion against the conception of what it is to be “human” – no good can come of a true struggle. Not only does the boy in the story symbolize the last spark of humanity, but he also symbolizes the persistence of man, the last ember that cannot be stamped, blown, or waited out. The boy remains “good,” in spite of the bad around him; he remains light, in spite of the darkness around him; he remains human, in spite of the inhumanity around him. Nothing can be done. And this spark grows to an ember, this ember to flame, and the flame to a blaze – the infection spreads. For what has happened in the story: the boy is alone in a world of hate, he is blown on by an “uncle,” and the fire spreads to that man, he is kindled by a family, and the fire spreads to them – a slippery slope. Despite the evil, despite the wickedness, despite the problem of compassion, what can be done? McCarthy’s answer: nothing.
–Anonymous
Perspective 2: Of Wakeful Fire
In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle. The story of a broken and abused Lithuanian man brought about great reforms in meat packing regulation, such as the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. (Foner) But Sinclair famously decried his apparent success saying: ”I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” (King) Hoping to critique capitalism and corporate corruption of the fading Gilded Age, the tale of Jurgis instead simply disgusted Americans who wanted higher quality beef from Chicago and couldn’t care less about the ideological message. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, has met a similar fate. Its audience has deceived itself into thinking that the tale of a man and his son is either just another made-for-screen drama or a nihilistic ‘God-is-Dead’ downer. On the contrary, The Road is an allegory to affirm Sigmund Freud’s thesis in his book, The Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud is most famous for his psychoanalysis concept; namely, that man has a three-part mind: a combination of the Id, Ego, and Superego. According to Freud, the Id contains the most base proclivities and unchecked desires. The Ego is the rational counterweight that allows man to make moral decisions and construct social structures like government. Most importantly, the Superego is itself the very definition of a human: it is the mechanism that enables the Ego to override the Id: the rational to override the irrational, the dispassionate to supersede the passionate.
Contrary to its misleading title, The Interpretation of Dreams is not a psychic manifesto but rather an extension of this three-part theory. Freud’s thesis is that dreams are the distillation of the Id. They are the stories and images of our most intense desires and drives: those instincts that are subdued by the Superego upon wakefulness. Benjamin Franklin, who coined the term “ego,” believed that such submission was good. He wrote “keep the mind fit and the ego in check.” (Ryan) In The Road, McCarthy agrees that the Superego ought to be elevated; arguing through the illustration of the conflict between a man who seeks to suppress his own dreams and those around him already living in a nightmare.
First, McCarthy reinforces Freud’s notion that the Superego is a natural aspect of the mind by demonstrating that it has been preserved in the Man and Son, despite the breakdown of government, infrastructure, stability, and peace. Even though society has been destroyed, the triumph of principle over raw instinct indicates the author believes the Superego does not require community construction. McCarthy directly ties into Freud’s book because the triumph of the Superego is accomplished mainly by suppressing dreams of comfort. The suppressing of dreams is necessary for the protagonists because only by sacrificing morality can they attain certain material, animal desires. That is, if the man and boy wanted to be consistently well-fed and comfortable, they would need to compromise their Ego by eating other people or ruthlessly taking from those left living. Instead, the man proclaims that the “good guys” have the “fire”: this dominance of the Superego that allows the temptations of comfort to be superseded by the value of moral dignity. He says to the boy, “You have to carry the fire… Where is it? I don’t know where it is. Yes you do. It’s inside of you.” (279) The fire is the Superego. It is the force of humanity that allows the “good” to face starvation of their bodies rather than starvation of their souls.
Another problem with dreams is that, even if they don’t highlight goals that require the compromise of morality, they reinforce the pursuit of impossible ends. Dreams highlight the inability of dreamers to satisfy desires and can be therefore detrimental to realistic hope: the will to live spiritually. McCarthy illustrates this when the he writes of the main character dreaming of his wife who killed herself at the fall of the world.
“He mistrusted all of that… the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was call for languor and death… He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew… he and the child and the sky… aching blue, but he was learning how to wake himself from such siren worlds. Lying awake in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth.” (18)
He continues, “when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be… then you’ll have given up. Do you understand? And you can’t give up”. (189)
Although the Superego is natural and dreams can be subdued by individual will, the author still laments the deconstruction of society. Of the main character, he writes, “He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw… the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun… running. The Crushing black vacuum of the universe. And… two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover.” (130) The loss of society is not so much the loss of material things as rather the harm to the Superego. Namely, the characters are referred to as “hunted animals… like ground foxes.” They are in a limbo between the Id and the Ego and their very humanity is pushed to the brink. This brink is created by two factors. First, the rift between dreams and acceptable reality is narrowing. While this may seem to be a good thing, it is actually negative because it makes dreams more difficult to resist. Its one thing to forgo a yacht or sports car for moral reasons, its considerably more difficult to forgo life itself for principle and therefore fewer people do. Second, society provides certain institutions that create incentive for the Superego to override the Id. Laws that would prohibit things like cannibalism and murder ingeniously tap the Id’s material orientation to check itself. Although one may dream of getting extremely wealthy by robbing a bank, the threat of jail time can override this desire even though both are material. On the other hand, without a government to protect rights and the material wealth that allows men to uphold such institutions, the State of Nature is exhibited. Frederick Nietzsche applauds such. He wrote, “I too speak of a ‘return to nature’ although it is not really a going-back but a going-up — up into a high, free, even frightful nature and naturalness.” By offering a dystopic vision of such a “going-up,” that includes deceit, abandon, rape, and, of course, cannibalism, McCarthy demonstrates that social structures are actually good because they institutionalize the Superego.
Whether McCarthy meant to advocate the Superego to protect us from each other or from ourselves, he, Freud, and Franklin have an effective case in The Road. In a world where “Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave”, (169) the Superego is dealt the ultimate crucible. If a conscience can survive in a State of Nature, it is not something constructed by society but instead ought to be revered in a society. Regardless of the unfortunate state of nature that resides within all of us in our darkest and most wonderful dreams, the Superego is what makes us human and serves as a survival mechanism as well as the moral nature that gives us the ultimate dignity and fire.
-Jim Donns
Works Cited…
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. The Interpretation of Dreams. Vol. 4. Plain Label, 1954. Print. Pelican Freud Library.
Goldin, Mark. “Book Review (of) The Road by Cormac McCarthy.” The New Review. Laura Hird. Web. 26 Feb. 2010. <http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/road.html>.
Hsieh, Diana M. “Instinct and Habit Connections between Nietzschean and Aristotelian Acquired Dispositions.” Enlightenment. Washington University in St-Louis, 16 Dec. 1996. Web. 26 Feb. 2010. <http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/dianamertzhsieh/dispositions.html>
King, Steve. “Sinclair’s Jungle.” Barnes and Noble Review. Barnes and Noble Llc, 25 Feb. 2010. Web. 26 Feb. 2010. <http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Daybook/Sinclair-s-Jungle/ba-p/2232>.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. 1st ed. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print.
Nietzche, Friederich W., R. J. Hollingdale, and Michael Tanner. Twilight of the Idols; And, The Anti-Christ. 2nd ed. Penguin Classics, 1990. Print. Reprint.
Ryan, Rey. “Sigmeund Freud: Psychoanalytic Stage.” Nursingbuzz. Mapiles.com, 11 Feb. 2010. Web. 5 Mar. 2010. <http://nursingbuzz.com/sigmeund-freud-psychoanalytic-stage/>.
“Sigmund Freud.” Dream Moods. Dreammoods.com, 5 May 2009. Web. 26 Feb. 2010. <http://www.dreammoods.com/dreaminformation/dreamtheory/freud.htm>.
Web. “Pure Food and Drug Act.” The Reader’s Companion to American History, Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors, published by. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991. Answers.com 05 Mar. 2010. <http://www.answers.com/topic/pure-food-and-drug-act>.
Perspective 3: Society’s Fall and the Social Contract
“With nothing to counter his wickedness, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Thomas Hobbes is famous for saying this in his work Leviathan, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, commonly called Leviathan (1651). The book concerns the structure of society and the structure of a legitimate government, proposing the ’social contract’ political theory. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road firmly supports the Hobbesian political theory by envisioning a world in dire need for order as man reverts to his natural state.
Hobbes’ theory takes root in the idea that man is inherently wicked. He makes the claim that man, in his state of nature, resorts to chaos and civil war. Stemming from that premise, Hobbes’ social contract theory claims that without a strong central government, man devolves into bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all). The world presented in McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic work of fiction The Road is an obvious example of this idea. The picture McCarthy paints shows a world where man must fight against his fellow man everyday in order to survive.
In the novel, society has crumbled. Where there was once government and order – the powerful, idealistic Democracies of the West – there is only Anarchy left. Armageddon has wiped these notions of the face of the Earth. In one passage, McCarthy writes of his main character “he saw the absolute truth of the world. Darkness implacable… The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And… two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover.” The man —McCarthy’s main character—believes this of the wasteland him and his son inhabit. The two animals being hunted are himself and his son. Hobbes worst fears have been realized. Man hunts man; cannibalism has become the norm. Fighting for survival, man wages war against all of his fellow men. Man’s state of nature is no longer philosophical discourse, but has become a most terrifying reality. Man, answering to no one, is free to kill and destroy as he pleases.
Goodness cannot survive in this environment. Cormac illustrates this through the character of the boy. He is referred to, throughout the book, as the last remnant of goodness left in the world. He is referred to as “carrying the fire”. The boy is created as a foil to the idea of man’s intrinsic wickedness. However, pouring a glass of tap-water into the ocean does not purify it of its salt. Similarly, an outlier to man’s wickedness, i.e the boy, does not redeem man from struggle, war, and cannibalism.
Therefore, McCarthy’s novel argues persuasively in favor of powerful government to achieve order. He outlines the treachery man is capable of when unbridled from civil laws and personal property. Thus, one is meant to realize that humanity’s survival and an individual’s safety depends on the rule of a strong, central government. When this system is eliminated, man is in constant danger from his fellow man. Any redeemable qualities of man are suffocated by the overwhelming force of the evil that is at his core.
Being the case, only a strong central government, led by an all-powerful sovereign can restore order in McCarthy’s envisioned nightmare. In a lawless world, with no authority, rape, cannibalism, theft, and murder become justifiable; there is nothing to counter them. Without authority, without consequences, man devolves and becomes bold – as Hobbes says Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei (there is no power on Earth that can compare to him). His ability for evil and destruction is unsurpassed; thus, a world where man is not subservient to a powerful is a world of bitter chaos and nasty.
–Dan McCarthy
Works Cited…
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage Books: New York. 2007.
