Coda—The Good of Story in The Road

Abstract

The book’s coda turns to McCarthy’s late novel The Road, which concerns a father and son, starkly designated as “the man” and “the boy,” as they journey south through a shattered, inhospitable world. Throughout the novel the narrative voice often merges with the father’s consciousness, granting readers a window upon the father’s inner effort to discover value or meaning and “seek out the upright” in an apparently meaningless world. In part, the man relies for his moral compass upon the good of story, and orients himself by summoning up texts from his former life, such as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, The Book of Job, and the moral fable of Baucis and Philemon recounted in the Roman Silver Age epic poem Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These intertexts may be writ small, but they mean large. It might be judged of McCarthy, as Dr. Samuel Johnson once judged of Milton, that his art has the power to carve a colossus even on a cherrystone. Like the man’s choicest, most felicitous recollection from his childhood, the novel teaches us, these tales and other like them are, after all, what remains to us “to shape the days upon.”