Cormac McCarthy’s The Road highlights the journey of a father and son traveling by foot through a burned America. The father is equipped with a single pistol and a shopping cart for what little belongings they can bring along as they move from place to place. They head South and then West throughout the story as they make their way to the coast in hopes of finding more people. The father tries to maintain faith that once they arrive at the coast they will find a new way to normalcy.
The man and his wife lived together in what is described as the “Old World”, which is somewhat similar to our present day world. The boy has no idea of what the Old World was like because he was born after the apocalypse. They seemed to live a normal life. When the boy asks, “Did you have any friends?” (59), the man replies, “Yes, I did.” (59) In the hero’s journey, this is the world of common day. Everything is fine and the hero has not yet been confronted with a call to adventure.
A mysterious disaster occurs while the man’s wife is pregnant with their son. The man’s explanation of this is, “A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” (52) After this unknown disaster occurs the wife gives birth to their son, and the man recalls this event in the story, “Her cries meant nothing to him...He held aloft the scrawny red body so raw and naked and cut the cord with kitchen shears and wrapped his son in a towel.” (59) The meeting with the mentor happens here, as the father ends up creating his own mentor. His son keeps him motivated on survival because he now has something to protect. The idea of introducing a world worth living in to his son even in the dire circumstances they are in keeps him going.
Only one character in the story refuses the call to action, and that is the mother. She does not want to face the harsh realities of the harmful new world, and so out of fear she takes her own life. She uses obsidian to cut her own throat. The man does not refuse the call to adventure, as he fights for his son’s survival as well as his own to the best of his abilities. There are a few different points in the story where he contemplates self-destruction to avoid being tortured or eaten while he struggles to keep him and his son alive. He also occasionally gives his son the pistol when he leaves him, so that his son can shoot himself before getting captured if something were to happen to his father.
The first threshold the man crosses occurs when he disposes of the photo of his wife in an attempt to move on with his new life. “Then he laid (the photograph) down in the road also and then he stood and they went on.' (51) This demonstrates his want to forget his old life in the Old World and create some sort of meaning for his new life.
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The father is tested when a cannibal that had spotted him and the boy did not want to let them go. He told the cannibal, 'If you look at [the boy] again I'll shoot you.' (65) The man then reached for the boy and held a knife to his throat, leading to the father shooting him in the head with one of his few remaining bullets. This shows that he has no patience when it comes to the safety of his son, and that he will do whatever it takes to ensure his safety.
The man and his son are once again tested when they spot cannibals passing by their camp. They have slaves, weapons, and pregnant women with them. They lay low and manage to make their escape, but they were very scared of being caught. He described them as “An army of tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings” (91)
The father and son are like pilgrims on a journey because they have to walk what seems to be hundreds of miles in order to get to safety, if any is even found. They are equipped with little food, and often have to go hungry. Their will to survive is constantly being tested, as well as their basic survival skills. The father must make quick decisions when confronted with people who want to do them harm, such as when they found the cache of naked people that were being used as food for the cannibals, 'naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.' (110) He and his son narrowly escaped being captured by the cannibals.
The man’s transformation throughout the novel includes his rapid decline in health due to some sort of respiratory illness, while the boy’s transformation shows him getting stronger throughout the novel. The father starts out with him often coughing and spitting up blood. At no point in the novel besides when he lived in the Old World is he portrayed as being healthy. He ends up passing away from his illness and a gunshot wound, but not before he has a discussion with the boy about “carrying the fire”. The man tells him, “Keep going south. Do everything the way we did it.” (278)
The boy ends up being adopted by a group of people that were following them after talking to a man with a shotgun who claimed that he was one of the “good guys”. His adoption can be seen as the “Return with the elixir”, as he now has a group of people that will keep him safe. He will remember what his dad taught him about survival, as well as the memories they shared.
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