Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes With Which to Sorrow It.

In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the reader is confronted with an alien world. Post-Apocalyptic and utterly devastated, the world as we know it is gone. The new world is hostile, some might say fallen -- it is a place veiled, always, in the pall of ash and dirt, where no plants or animals can even hope to live, and the human population fares little better. Those who haven't killed themselves turn to their only other viable option -- cannibalism. In a world where no one is friend and every solitary day is a struggle for survival, what do morals--love thy number, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not eat thy neighbor's face--even mean?

Turns out, a lot -- at least to the nameless narrator and his son. The book follows the nameless man and his child as they try to survive another day in a world that doesn't bear survival. Through their struggles to find food, shelter, and ever more ingenuous ways to avoid being captured and eaten by other survivors, they are faced with questions that seem unanswerable: are there things more important than survival? What are they? And in a world like this, does any of it matter?

He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

Yet the man and the boy come to find that, perhaps, it is those fragile beliefs that keep them human, keep them utterly different from the cannibals that have thrown all aside in favor of physical survival. Perhaps the world they are in isn't worth their struggle, but those other things are.

McCarthy's writing is both rich and sparse: passages of breathtaking, metaphorical prose are integrated and juxtaposed with simple, terse description of actions and events. Despite the radical premise of the story, the action-arc isn't explosive -- it's basic, realistic (whatever that means in a place like that) descriptions of every day actions necessary for survival.

What I found remarkable about the book was that despite its radical, nearly unimaginable setting, it still forced me to think about the same questions the narrator posed. Those aren't questions purely reserved for a post-Apocalyptic world, they are for the here, now, and everyday. There were certainly sections in the story that made me cringe and turned my stomach (hi, People Pantry?), sections that felt slightly gratuitous in their shock-value, so I would definitely advise caution for the weak of stomach. But overall I recommend it as a really interesting read with some beautiful writing and thought-provoking questions.