Reader response to Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

With the man and his son, I traversed the bleak world in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” and I imagined divinity.  This man is God – if God were written with a lower case ‘g.’ This is man is god, if god could be god and not be all-powerful.  He navigated a cold world of death with no benevolent deity sustaining things.  All he could do was survive and protect and provide for the young son. 

He got no help and was met with unfeeling obstacles.  What worsened the antagonism was the emotionless quality of it. When people came against him, they weren’t malevolent, even though he and the boy used the naïve term “bad guys.”  They were faceless enemies who had no care for the man and the boy.  The antagonists didn’t hate them.  They were compassionlessly indifferent.  The man and the boy, for the antagonists, were simply prey.

As I read and wandered the forsaken road, I thought this is God if God were impotent instead of omnipotent.

Upon finishing the work and reflecting upon it, I imagined something quite different.  The reason the opponents acted with unfeeling purpose was the need to survive and a ravaged, lifeless landscape.  Every character in the book is on one mission – survive this moment.  Thus, the humans are not gods.  They are not even human.  They are Darwinian mammals who sense no meaning in the world.  It is reduced to base survival of the fittest.

The man vainly clings to vestiges of human society, but bit by bit, he lets meaningful life slide through his fingers.  The ending is remarkably like Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”  There, the surviving protagonist is canine, not human.  In “the Road,” the surviving protagonist have been reduced to something less than human.  In both cases, there is survival, but what does it matter?  What is life beyond the next moment?