To Live or to Die?: A Reader’s Response to The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Oh Cormac McCarthy and your lack conventional grammatical structure! After reading All the Pretty Horses over the summer, I vowed never to read another one of McCarthy’s books, but here I am having completed The Road in a matter of 36 hours, recommending it to anyone mildly interested in post-apocalyptic and dystopian literature. McCarthy has a unique writing style that can be confusing at some points and boring at others, but unlike All the Pretty Horse, The Road is gripping, chilling, and heart wrenching.

If you haven’t read the book, I don’t want to give away the ending, so I’ll set the stage. Picture this: You are in a post-apocalyptic world, where fire and firestorms have consumed all forests and cities. The ash and soot from these fires has left everything gray and the river waters black. All color in the world, except for blood and fire, exists only in memories and dreams. On the Interstates, “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber” and the “incinerate corpses [have] shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats.” Now, the sun rarely penetrates the atmosphere, leaving the surface of the Earth a barren frozen wasteland. Small pockets of humans remain and virtually all other forms of life have vanished. Food is extremely scarce and fellow humans are highly likely to kill and eat you.

The main characters of the novel, a father and his son, are living in this post-apocalyptic world, holding on to their existence by tenuous threads. Nearly every moment consists of terror and misery, and when threats seem less immediate, they have a quick moment to get lost in their memories, which tend to induce painful regret and a greater sense of helplessness.

During one of the father’s flashbacks, we learn that the father’s wife was once living and travelling with the father and the boy. She believed that their journey was useless and said told the father, “Soon or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won’t face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I can’t. I can’t.” The mother was ready to die and had lost the will to continue trying to survive in the harsh and dangerous conditions. That same night she left and killed herself. It is apparent that the mother and father spent many nights “debating the pros and cons of self-destruction”, and it seems as though she eventually lost all hope for the future and decided to end her life, leaving the father and son alone. Was it right for the mother to take her own life, leaving the father and son to fend for themselves?

My question for everyone is: If you were in a post-apocalyptic world of any kind, would you have the will to fight for your life until your last breath? Or would you want to end your life because you believed there is no hope for a pleasurable future? Is life worth fighting for when you’re on a road that leads nowhere?

 

A Reader’s Response to The Canterbury Tales: What is Love?

Based on the tales we have read so far in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, love seems to be a very prominent motif in both male and female stories. However, I’d like to focus my attention on the dichotomy between the love expressed in the Knight’s and the Wife of Bath’s tales, which, I want to point out, are told by two separate genders.

The Knight tells a verbose tale about two knights, Arcite and Palamon. Both men are Theban princes and get incarcerated by Theseus, the king of Athens. While sharing the same prison cell, both men fall instantly in love with Emily, the younger sister of the Queen, and vow to devout their lives to her. Arcite and Palamon agree that love is the supreme law, so they resolve that each man must fend for himself in the battle for Emily’s love and hand in marriage. Arcite, who gets banished from Athens with a death sentence upon his return, and Palamon, who continues to sit in an Athenian prison cell, spend many years in agony doting over Emily, and eventually the two confront their mutual love for Emily and decide to fight to the death. The fact that Arcite and Palamon are willing to break their knight’s oath of protecting one another in order to win the love of a distant woman is chivalrous and heart-felt. Arcite and Palamon express a type of fairy tale love where the woman is put on a pedestal and praised for her beauty and personality. Some may argue that this is objectifying women because Emily is given no choice. At one point in the tale, Emily expresses that she wants to remain a virgin all of her life, but Diana tells her that she will marry one of the two knights. Are Arcite and Palamon admirable for their devotion and love for Emily? Or are they inconsiderate for disregarding how Emily wants to live her life?

Unlike Arcite and Palamon’s love for Emily, the Wife of Bath’s tale puts most of the decision power on the woman, and her form of love is mainly sexual. Arcite and Palamon have an emotional draw towards Emily while the Wife of Bath bases her spouses on money and appearance. She openly states, “Blessed be God that I have married five, and always for the money in his chest and for his nether purse, I picked the best,” (208) which means that she chooses men only for their material wealth and/or their physical characteristics. The Wife of Bath believes that marriage is a financial contract as opposed to an emotional and physical loyalty between the spouses, as described in the Knight’s tale. The Knight believes in an emotional form of love while the Wife of Bath sees love in a mainly physical manner. Based on society nowadays, it seems like the woman is the openly romantic partner in a relationship, treating love like Arcite and Palamon, and women who view love similarly to the Wife of Bath are looked down upon. So, like the Haddaway song, what is love? What does Chaucer mean to express by showing two vastly dichotomous views on love from two different genders?

 

Growing Up Too Fast: A Reader’s Response to All the Pretty Horses

As I was making my way through McCarthy’s novel, which apparently “puts other American authors to shame” (The New York Times Book Review quote from the cover), I realized that it is a bildungsroman of John Grady Cole. When he runs away, he is a 16 year-old boy still clinging to that teenage sense of invincibility, excited for what the future holds. Upon his return, however, he is a grown man, having aged beyond his years due to his intense experiences in Mexico. Personally, I know that I get the “you’ve grown up too fast” sentiment from my parents and relatives pretty frequently nowadays, but compared to John Grady, I have grown up at a rather snail-like pace. Just think about it – John Grady leaves the “comfort” (although comfort is a debatable term) of his home in San Angelo, Texas to the vast unknown of Mexico, having just lost his grandfather and his dream of ranch. Already, at 16 years old, he has lost his one dream in life, while the only dream I lost was when I was 8 years old and my mom told me that singing was not a promising career for someone of my vocal talents.

When John Grady and Rawlins run into Blevins along their journey to the boarder, John Grady begins to serve as the older brother to both Blevins and Rawlins. Even though he is the same age as the other two boys, he is more mature and has useful wisdom to bestow upon his fellow travelers. Again, John Grady is forced further into adulthood because he feels responsible for the safety of Rawlins and Blevins, like an older brother or father. An example of this father like relationship is when Blevins panics during the lightening storm and loses all of his belongings, including his clothes, so John Grady offers his spare shirt and allows Blevins to ride on the back of his horse. “John Grady shook his head. He reached and unbuckled his saddlebag and took out his spare shirt and pitched it down to Blevins” (72). John Grady expresses his disappointment, but ultimately aids Blevins because he feels a parental obligation for Blevins. Keep in mind; this is only in the first section of the novel.

In section two, he begins working for Don Hector Rocha’s ranch, La Purisma, and falls madly in love with Alejandra Rocha, the gorgeous and rebellious daughter of Don Hector Rocha. When Rocha finds out about his daughter’s love affair with John Grady, he turns Rawlins and John Grady in to the police as criminals. The two boys proceed to go to prison, and John Grady gets in a knife fight, which is apparently pretty common in that prison, killing his opponent. Again, at the age of 16, John Grady has lost is one big dream of inheriting his grandfather’s ranch, fallen head over heels for his boss’s daughter, and killed a man in a common prison knife fight. And if that wasn’t enough, in section three, Alejandra breaks John Grady’s heart and upon his return to San Angelo he discovers that his father has passed away. In the span of only one or two years, John Grady has faced many of the curve balls that life will throw at an average person in his or her lifetime.

Let me reiterate, compared to John Grady, and I may only be speaking for myself, my process of growing up has been pretty lethargic, whether or not my parents want to agree. Did John Grady miss out on a significant portion of his childhood? Or is this a common phenomenon for a 16-year-old boy in 1949? Has society made it more acceptable for children to slow their maturity? If so, is this in turn affecting society in a positive or negative way? I could argue both sides for hours.