a Complex Post-Romantic Allegory
Gert van Driel 1051180
MA Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture 17 December 2014
Supervisor: Dr. Evert Jan van Leeuwen Second reader: Inge ’t Hart MA, MPhil.
Introduction...1
Intertextuality...3
The Romantic Origins of Apocalyptic Science Fiction...3
The Significance of Allegory...9
Kant and the International Framework...10
Chapter 1: Perspectives on Survival Ethics in The Road: Cannibalism and Suicide...14
1.1: Introduction...14
1.2: Ethical Positions on Survival Cannibalism in the Romantic Period, compared to The Road and Other Apocalyptic Narratives...15
1.3: Ethical and Psychological Perspectives on Suicide in The Road and Other Apocalyptic Narratives...24
1.4: Conclusion...29
Chapter 2: The Symbol of Fire and the Religious Propensities of Hope in The Road...31
2.1: Introduction...31
2.2: The Fire: A Secular and Religious Symbol of Hope...32
2.3: The Moral Radicalisation of People’s Characters in Regard to Hope...36
2.4: The Road’s Tendency Towards the Theoretical Question of What to Hope...40
2.5: Conclusion...45
Chapter 3: Romantic Perspectives on a Post-Apocalyptic Road Narrative...46
3.1: Introduction...46
3.2: The Post-Apocalyptic Narrative Shift...46
3.3: A Road-Narrative: Place, Time and a Romantic Perspective...50
3.4: Conclusion...55
Chapter 4: Man Against Nature: Allegorical Mode and Elements in The Road...57
4.1: Introduction...57
4.2: Allegorical Interpretation...57
4.3: Allegorical Conventions in The Road...60
4.4: Return to the Cave: Plato Revisited...63
4.5: Horror Movies: Allegorising Trauma and the Human Condition...66
4.5: Conclusion...70
Conclusion...71
Introduction
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (McCarthy 138)
Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006) describes an ashen-grey, “cold illucid world” (123), the anarchic aftermath of an unspecified worldwide disaster. The pared-down writing style and the motifs of entropy and violence are recurring elements in McCarthy’s works of fiction. According to Christopher Walsh, parallels with The Road and other McCarthy novels can be found in its depiction of a “wasteland that is littered with dead, dying, and at times ossified corpses” (257).
Ben Gerdts, describes how McCarthy’s “wasteland” has been interpreted differently by various critics. Some
view[ed] such bloodshed as an extension of nihilism redirected as punishment for humankind’s carelessness regarding the natural world; this resulted in many ecological interpretations [of his works]. Other scholars discern interpretative value in the storytelling, dialogism, and dialectic aspects of McCarthy‘s fiction. (3)
In addition, Gerdts affirms that McCarthy’s works have been increasingly popular as a subject of scholarly research (3).
Much of The Road’s critical reception and scholarly research indicates that the novel reaches beyond the scope of any single literary or popular genre. Instead, its popular as well as academic appeal lies in its trans-generic nature. As a Pulitzer Prize -winning novel, a “national bestseller,” and the source for a Hollywood blockbuster, The Road is a fictional narrative with great presence in Western culture today. Walsh is one of many to acknowledge The Road’s cultural relevance: “It is clear that The Road asks some profound questions about American culture and the relationship between myth, history, and the national consciousness” (254). He claims that, to a great extent, The Road satisfies a need for cultural identity through fiction.
Within a year after The Road’s publication in 2006, the novel won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, ranking it among the major literary works of the past decade. While such a prize suggests that it is one of the major literary works of the past decade, its bestselling status and adaptation into a motion picture warrant a critical approach that takes into account a broader cultural context that includes the contemporary popular genres of science fiction, its sub-genre of apocalyptic fiction, and, as this thesis will show, also the literary movement of Romanticism.
A Romantic perspective on The Road might seem unexpected, but the chapters in this thesis will reveal that the novel contains many literary techniques, motifs and themes that can be traced back specifically to Romantic texts in the apocalyptic tradition, as well as philosophical ideas concerning human ethics that were developed within Romantic and later science fiction literature, initially in response to Kantian ethics. These specific themes and ideas will serve as the framework of reference for this research, to be introduced and placed in context in the following subsections.
Intertextuality
Arthur Asa Berger explains that “texts […] are suspended between the past and the future. They are intertextual […] in that they are affected, to varying degrees, by texts that have preceded them and have, to varying degrees, affected their creators, and, at the same time, they also anticipate the future” (36). By reading The Road within an intertextual network containing core ideas from Kant’s ethical philosophy, Romantic apocalyptic literature, as well as modern apocalyptic science fiction stories that further developed the Romantic apocalyptic strain, it is possible to explain why and how The Road’s style and motifs create such poignant melancholic perspectives on the influence of the environment on the moral framework of the characters in the novel, its ethical positions on respect for life and the self, on hope where none can be reasonably given, and the transcendental question of what happens after death.
According to Berger, “our creativity” is “dialogical” (93), “our writing or speech is always connected to ideas and thoughts that have been communicated in the past” (35). The Road brings into conversation with each other Kantian ideas
concerning ethics, that have been appropriated by Romantic writers, whose themes and modes of representation have since been appropriated and transformed by writers of modern apocalyptic science-fiction.
The Romantic Origins of Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Modern Anglo-American apocalyptic fiction is of course deeply rooted in Western religious apocalyptic traditions, but in the framework of this thesis, the literary apocalyptic traditions of science fiction and Romanticism are more relevant.
According to David Ketterer, modern apocalyptic literature draws upon “the poetry of the romantics” (ix), particularly Blake and Byron.
According to Birch, Romanticism is “a literary movement, and profound shift in sensibility, which took place [throughout] Europe roughly between 1770 and 1848” (842). Politically, the movement “was inspired by the revolutions in America and France,” giving it its international status. It was especially in its response to these Revolutions that Romanticism revealed its apocalyptic tendency. Looking back at the age of Revolution, the British poet Robert Southey wrote: “Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race” (“The French Revolution”, n.p.). Southey’s diction attests to the Romantics’ desire for change, their focus on the future, but also their emphasis on the importance of the imagination.
While “in the early 1790s, the first generation of Romantic poets incorporated in their poems a vision of the French Revolution as the early stage of the abrupt
culmination of history, in which there will emerge a new humanity on a new earth that is equivalent to a restored paradise,” (“The French Revolution”, n.p.) not all Romantic writing presents the apocalypse in such millennial terms. In Darkness (1816), Byron created a powerful image of an apocalypse that corresponds much more to the modern popular understanding of the term. Instead of expressing a vision of regeneration, Byron’s poem depicts a darkening, dying world:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation. (ll.1-8)
Byron’s poem was written and published after the French Revolution had proven to be as destructive as it had been regenerative. It represents the other extreme of the Romantic apocalyptic imagination, an obsession with the end. Significantly, The Road shares with Darkness almost all its major literary symbols and narrative depictions of the wasteland.
Both narrators express an extremely pessimistic view of human life and
existence. The Road is not entirely conclusive on the subject of the apocalypse. Byron surpasses McCarthy by presenting a world entirely lacking a moral framework, or sense of hope: the darkness makes no distinction between the religious or morally just; the narrator suggests there is no future or an afterlife. The entire world of Darkness is destroyed and ends as “a lump of death—a chaos of hard clay” (l. 72); similarly, the world in The Road has become “silent, barren, godless” (2). The personification of the dying earth prompts an allegorical interpretation of these texts, as texts concerned with the changing human condition, as will be discussed Chapter 4.
Apocalyptic fiction presents a future where contemporary social developments and values are pushed to technological or moral limits, using the end-of-the-world scenario as a “pretext for reorganising society,” as was the case in the early positive Romantic apocalyptic vision of the French Revolution, or its “destruction” (Bould and Vint, ch. 2), following the Byronic apocalyptic vision. Narratives of apocalyptic fiction commonly contain either a natural or man-made disaster as plot device. There are also two different versions of post-apocalyptic narratives. In one, the chaos that ensues in its aftermath is often set right again with the resourcefulness of a few
people, but in the other, a natural equilibrium is reached between humans and their environment. As a result of this natural balance, the survivors have organised
themselves in smaller communities, often under primitive circumstances, reminiscent of the Romantic “antipathy towards society” (Day 41), and “sometimes deeply resistant to science and technology” (Bould and Vint, ch. 5).
Since the Romantic period, the central themes of apocalyptic fiction can be traced back to contemporary social, political or technological developments. Some of these themes are elitist control over the last resources of food, using coercive methods of authority, including references to cannibalism, as in Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Byron’s Darkness, or films such as Soylent Green (1973). Works within the genre, since the Romantic age, also often explore what happens to the mind-set of humankind in the face of extinction by, for example, nuclear fallout, as in Neville Shute’s On The Beach (1949); mankind’s return to a primitive society as in Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885); unstoppable pandemics and other biological causes that threaten the human race with extinction, as again The Last Man (1826) or Stepgen King’s The Stand (1978). All of these examples of apocalyptic fiction describe a vulnerability and defencelessness of the human species against the immense, destructive powers of nature or humankind itself.
One of the very first modern popular fiction texts to introduce the
above-mentioned themes was Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), often defined as the first science fiction narrative. Sceptical of the beneficent effects of certain contemporary scientific developments, Shelley provided a critique of science; the novel’s plot revolves mainly around the disastrous aftermath caused by the monstrous creation of the novel’s protagonist Dr Victor Frankenstein. While Frankenstein explores
fully-fledged apocalyptic narrative. It was the first novel to describe how mankind is unable to survive the cause of a natural occurring disaster, the relentlessness of a global pandemic, despite modern science and politics.
Despite being a ground-breaking work of Romantic apocalyptic fiction, The Last Man was not republished between 1833 and 1965. It did instigate a boom in apocalyptic fiction in the nineteenth century. Wagar explains that Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887) and Jefferies’ After London (1885) are all closely related to Shelley’s novel (Ch.2). The Romantic critique of science and fearful vision of the destructive powers of nature – in the shape of disease – have remained staple ingredients of apocalyptic fiction and thus Shelley’s forgotten work remains a key intertext to new productions within the genre.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, H.G. Wells coined the term “Fantastic and Imaginative Romances” to define his own brand of science fiction (Stableford 468). When the omnibus The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells (1933) was published, Wells personally accepted the more popular term “scientific romance” for his works. The term describes both elements of fictional and scientific writing, and during the second half of the twentieth century, scientific romance came to refer to the British variety of science fiction that was written between 1850 and 1920 (468), the immediate post-Romantic aftermath. Scientific romances were narratives that
depicted the world from an evolutionary, but necessarily positivist, perspective. Like Shelley’s novel, they had little interest in heroism, and painted a future in which political and technological mayhem has become the human condition. H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle even introduced nameless protagonists in a few of their novels, who much like Byron’s and Shelley’s characters were defenceless in the face of natural forces.
In 1929, Hugo Gernsback introduced the term “Science Fiction,” which would replace scientific romance. Gernsback was an editor of one of the world’s first science fiction magazines, Amazing. By publishing his works through channels of popular fiction, trying to seek “a degree of literary, intellectual and moral respectability to his pulp endeavour,” he played an important part in “enabling SF to be perceived as a distinct genre” (Bould and Vint, ch. 1).
While demonstrating a fascination for scientific ideas and developments, it is important to remember that early science fiction, as a literary movement, also continued Romanticism’s critical response the industrial, political and scientific revolutions. While often looking forward, works of science fiction also express “anxiety about humanity and its social order as currently configured” (Bould and Vint, ch. 2). This interest in exploring what William Blake in “London” called “the
mind-forg’d manacles” (l. 8) that stifle human understanding, is a Romantic aspect of the genre that has remained integral to its identity since its beginnings. For example, in The Time Machine (1895), Wells constructed a narrative that has been interpreted as a critical exploration of Darwinist ideas about the “future evolution” of mankind (485). Wells’ science-fiction classic also has an allegorical level: time travel is merely a plot device that enables the narrative to figuratively explore notions of socialism and, according to Wells, “the inequities, injustices, and hypocrisies of contemporary society that were ripe for eradication” (566). In this last statement Wells showed himself the literary heir to the Romantic radical philosopher and novelist William Godwin, as well as his disciple Percy Shelley, who at the turn of the nineteenth century had a similar vision of how the products of their imagination would regenerate a dying society.
The Significance of Allegory
In the nineteenth century, allegory remained an important literary technique, despite the resistance of many Romantics.1 In Reinventing Allegory (1997), Theresa Kensey
describes how the technique has developed through modern literature, and argues that it a “reminder of the unremitting problem of universals and their material of figural substantiation” (119). In essence, this means that allegorical narratives depict “people as things” and ideas (119). Of course, it is also possible to sever the character or person from the depicted idea, when the author has skilfully mastered the art of suspension of disbelief, and has created a believable character. Nevertheless, allegory involves a universalist philosophical approach, as it transforms characters into
personifications and abstractions, mostly of ethical positions like good or evil, which drew a poet like Percy Shelley to turn to allegory for one of his most political poems, “The Mask of Anarchy.” Romantic scholar, Paul de Man, claims that allegory was in fact used often in Romantic literature. He describes how, for example, Wordsworth used allegory in his poetry:
The prevalence of allegory always corresponds to the unveiling of an
authentically temporal destiny. This unveiling takes place in a subject that has sought refuge against the impact of time in a natural world to which, in truth, it bears no resemblance. (qtd. Day 118)
De Man has surveyed the use of figurative language from the later eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, and found the use allegory never actually disappeared during the Romantic age. He adds that Romantics did characterise “allegory negatively” and 1
Despite the Romantics’ resistance to allegory, some of the major Romantic poems invite allegorical readings; Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” for instance.
scorned it for “being merely a reflection” (qtd. Day 114); therefore, it was not a literary device that was mentioned often.
Russell Hillier explains that “McCarthy scholarship has long appreciated his novels’ affinity with allegory” (53). He points out that Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), “as one of the most prominent allegories in the English language,” can be regarded as a precursor to The Road’s themes of “pilgrimage and restless wandering” (Hillier 53). As this thesis will show, these themes are as much Romantic as Christian themes. I will propose that McCarthy’s The Road is in fact as much a complex
“Romantic” allegory as a work of apocalyptic fiction; through its apocalyptic
narrative, it expresses sentiments concerning the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but does so through Romantic literary techniques, motifs and forms of reasoning.
Kant and the International Framework
While The Road’s relation to other apocalyptic and science-fiction narratives, motifs, and philosophical ideas has been researched and studied separately, this thesis will situate The Road in a fuller intertextual network that exists at the centre of the overlapping genres of apocalyptic fiction, science fiction and Romanticism. In
addition, I would like to point out that, in this thesis, science fiction and Romanticism are seen as international genres and movements. Even though The Road depicts the end of the entire world, McCarthy’s works have been considered quintessentially American, and this novel’s setting is also decidedly American. An intertextual approach warrants an international approach, however, as it explores the exchange and cross-fertilisation of literary, themes, motifs and intellectual ideas. Romanticism and science fiction are international literary movements, and the ideas, motifs and
literary techniques that have become central to Romanticism and science fiction have developed from the outset by means of international exchange of print culture.
The role of Kantian philosophical ideas in this thesis is exemplary of this international framework. Kathleen Wheeler, for instance, speaks of “the major impact that Kant consolidated, if not actually produced, on the minds of his younger
contemporaries such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats” (42). Her essay on Kant’s impact on Romanticism reveals that philosophical ideas, as well as literary tropes developed within an international intellectual culture and were not nation bound. She concludes, “Kant’s great influence on romanticism was…the
systematization of the mind as synthetic and creative, and not merely as associative and selective” (46). Poets like Coleridge and
Shelley never developed a philosophic system designed to articulate a final worldview, seeking rather to experiment with the implications of the synthetic powers of the imagination (understood as a field for activity) and of metaphor as a direct instrument and form of human knowledge. (Wheeler 51)
Many Romantic writers adopted the concepts of human reason Kant used. Even though they never fully integrated his proposed systemisation of it, they particularly attributed human intuition and imagination as higher functions in human reason.
In relation to this division, Kant’s Critiques of Pure Reason united two tendencies: the spatiotemporal world and the rational world. He also identified a higher function in human reason, a way to intuitively reach beyond the rational world into the theoretical, and determine the philosophical positions of ethics, law and duty. According to Kant, “intuition” was a conceptual attribute every individual possessed.
Kant’s Critiques of Pure Reason influenced many Romantic thinkers, as they
borrowed his ideas of how the human mind could somehow order, shape and impose significance on life. The Road shares with much Romantic writing an indebtedness to the general principles – if not the specific philosophical arguments - of Kant’s
thoughts on ethics. This will be explored in more detail in Chapter 1 of this thesis. In order to fully grasp the intricacy of The Road’s intertextual web and
Romantic debt, chapter one will contrast the way McCarthy portrays the apocalyptic motifs of cannibalism and suicide, common plot elements in many works of dark Romanticism and science fiction. The chapter will show how these motifs facilitate the radicalisation of the moral framework of The Road’s characters. This
radicalisation can be explained by reading the narrative in light of Kantian
metaphysics. Therefore, chapter one will also investigate and discuss the presence and relevance of the concepts of cannibalism and suicide in Immanuel Kant’s theories from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals and Critique of Pure Reason. The primary purpose of this is to explore the moral framework of The Road in reference to the Romantic idea of universal ethics.
According to M.H. Abrams, many Romantic thinkers attempted “to reconstitute the grounds of hope”; as a consequence, they wondered “how a renewed mankind will inhabit a renovated earth” (qtd. in Day 4). For example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man not only chronicles the collapse of civilisation. It is also an elegy for lost loved ones, a reflection on the pointlessness of contemporary Western ideals in the face of
extinction. To Lionel, one of the novel’s protagonists, God is absent while everyone he loves dies. Eventually, there is no hope for an afterlife. In this sense, The Last Man’s hopelessness is unique, and there would be no novel like it in post-apocalyptic
fiction until On The Beach (1957). The Road is one of the latest narratives to achieve the same level of hopelessness. The main purpose of chapter two is to explore the concept of hope in The Road, in context of the post-apocalyptic survivalism of its main characters. The concept will be regarded from a religious perspective, but also from a secular perspective, because Kant regarded the act of hope to be of both a rational and a religious tendency.
Chapter three will compare and contrast literary techniques such as plotting, narrative voice and style in The Road and other works of Romantic and SF
apocalyptic fiction. This chapter will offer a more thorough understanding of the complex literary nature of McCarthy’s work, and how its hybrid identity as a Romantic, SF apocalyptic narrative allows it to reflect in a unique way on the philosophical questions it raises. What is left of a person’s humanity and moral identity when literally everything else is stripped away, including the empirical evidence of hope for humanity’s survival?
Chapter 4 will focus specifically on The Road’s figurative language and its allegorical potential by comparing the narrative to two key forms of allegory, the “Cave Allegory” from Plato’s The Republic (380 BC) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). The chapter ends with an analysis of the reference to one of the most recent forms of allegorical story-telling, zombie horror, in The Road: “We are the walking dead in a horror film” (7).
Chapter 1: Perspectives on Survival Ethics in The Road: Cannibalism and Suicide
1.1: Introduction
This chapter will explore the themes of cannibalism and suicide in The Road, in relation to Romantic works like Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and apocalyptic science fiction stories such as Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Shute’s On the Beach (1957), amongst others. What will become clear from this comparative analysis is how both cannibalism and suicide are recurring motifs in the tradition of
apocalyptic writing in works of the Romantic period, contemporary science fiction and The Road, and how these motifs add to the construction of their protagonists’ moral framework. In addition to this, this chapter will show that The Road contains Kantian positions concerning respect for human life and dignity for the individual.
Regarding cannibalism and murder, the two protagonists of The Road have created a moral framework in which the good “carry the fire” (136) and “dont kill” (274), and the bad “eat people” (304) and “kill” (58). The post-apocalyptic
circumstances in The Road have created a situation in which only a handful of people are able to uphold such a moral framework. Both the protagonist’s late wife – who has committed suicide – and the bloodcults seem to have lost respect for their own or other people’s lives, and by this reasoning, convey they act out of necessity, not out of freedom. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Eldridge explains, “Kant calls our consciousness of freedom ‘the most insoluble of problems’ and argues that it stems from our awareness of [moral] law” (14). For the cannibals, the ends justify the means. The protagonist’s wife uses the same normative ethical argument, but oppositely, for fear of prolonged suffering and loss of dignity, she kills herself.
According to Eldridge, “the idea of an understanding of our plights, powers and possibilities that draws us in, yet cannot be grounded in any discovery of properties of substances, lies at the heart of Kant’s critical philosophy” (13). In The Road, these “plights, powers and possibilities” form the foundation of the moral framework of the novel as well. The only existing moral framework seems to be in the hands of the man and the boy, who’s innate ethics seem to survive outside of any social, legal, or other manmade institution.
1.2: Ethical Positions on Survival Cannibalism in the Romantic Period, compared to The Road and Other Apocalyptic Narratives
Cannibalism as a survival method is a central motif of apocalyptic fiction. In reality, survival cannibalism can be found in extreme situations of survival. In this
perspective, cannibalism is mostly described as an innate drive to survive, which signifies that it is used as a last resort, when all other sources of food have depleted. Under those circumstances, one can either choose to live or die. The choice to die could lead to suffering a slow, painful death of hunger. The only alternative to suffering and death is suicide. This section will show that The Road follows both Romantic and later Science Fiction narratives in using the motif of cannibalism as the basis for its protagonists’ moral framework; it is one of their ethical criteria.
In case of survival cannibalism, the moral dilemma is comprised of a lethal aspect opposing the instinct of survival: kill or die. The situation for this dilemma arises when the killing of one or more persons creates better chances of survival for the others, provided that the second group already had better chances of survival. The circumstances that created the dilemma in the first place are isolated from the
context created during survival circumstances, the experience is regarded from the person’s original moral perspective. At that moment, it becomes a matter of
conscience, because the survivor has killed and eaten another human being. Survival circumstances put cannibalism into a different perspective, and according to Jennifer Brown, “examples of this type of cannibalism are found in times of war and hardship, such as under Mao’s dictatorship in China, during the Siege of Leningrad, on board stranded ships, or during the first explorations of the Poles” (6).
Against comparable survival circumstances, The Road’s two protagonists have created a micro-society of their own. Isolated from the man’s original cultural and social background, they are marooned in a different world, just like the early explorers of the poles, or people besieged in a war-ridden country, bereft of any natural sources of food. Except, they do not kill other humans to eat their flesh in order to survive, but persist in searching for tinned food and other edible things. In essence, the man tries to protect his son’s future conscience. The man holds them to the moral framework “the good.”
Survival cannibalism in Romantic fiction can be found in, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). During his second voyage, Pym, after having been deliriously seasick, having survived a mutiny and a severe storm, narrates how they are confronted with an ethical dilemma. With no sign of rescue, the men face death by starvation and thirst, so a fellow shipmate named Richard Parker suggests that one of them should be killed as food for the other survivors. Following a certain marine custom, to which this chapter will refer later, they all draw straws. Pym considers their situation, by saying that “there are few conditions into which man can possibly fall where not feel a deep interest in the preservation of his existence; an interest momentarily increasing with frailty of the
tenure by which that existence may be held” (Poe 180). Ironically, Richard Parker, the same character who proposed the idea, is drawn. Arthur continues his thoughts before the deed is done, and says in defence that “before any one condemn me for this apparent heartlessness, let him be placed in a situation precisely similar to my own” (Poe 181). Essentially, he refers to cannibalism as a last resort for survival, not entirely unique to nineteenth-century marine customs, as Brown explains: “[By] the eighteenth-century cannibalism among sailors in survival times had come to be regarded as ‘regrettable but practically unavoidable’, and was addressed in a ‘darkly comedic manner’ in broadsheets and penny ballads” (221).
One of these cases in marine history closely resembles Poe’s narrative. The following incident dates to 1886, when four men on a ship, called the Mignonette, were en route from England to Australia. Their lifeboat became adrift, after the ship sank in the Atlantic. “When, months later, they were picked up, barely alive, there were only three left. The youngest, a boy of 17, was missing. He did not drown but was killed and eaten - by his fellow shipmates” (Lewis). As it happened, the boy’s health had declined. After some consideration, his fellow shipmates killed him and ate him, instead of waiting for the young man to die of natural causes. “They made no attempt to conceal the truth. They felt justified by what was called ‘the custom of the sea’ - the sacrifice of one seaman's life to save others. Nonetheless, they were put on trial for murder” (Lewis). During their isolation from society, they had to overcome their innate moral framework to justify their act of cannibalism.
The isolation of the Mignonette shipwreck not only created the opportunity for a new moral framework. Their moral framework was derived from “the custom of the sea,” which included several survival principles and guidelines. One of these practices became drawing straws. The needs justified the means, consequently opening doors
for alternative principles of the ethics of survival. Bentham’s theory of Utilitarianism complements that, if need be departed from traditional principles, “these are the real difficulties, the knotty points in the theory of ethics, as in the conscientious guidance of personal conduct. They are overcome practically, with greater or lesser success, according to the intellect and virtue of the individual” (Troyer 114). The sailors’ guidance of personal conduct was externalised by drawing straws, and the person holding the shortest straw was the first to be eaten.
In apocalyptic fiction, these “customs” are usually dramatised or implicated with a sense of horror. In Max Brooks’ World War Z (2007), American survivors try to escape the zombie-apocalypse by fleeing to the Northern parts of the United States and Canada. Due to the unforgiving winter, the resulting hunger and extreme famine drive some of the survivors to “questionable survival methods” (Brooks 364),
implying that they have turned to cannibalism. Except for the behaviour of “the infected,” the book does not describe in particular what these “survival methods” involved. The film Soylent Green (1973) depicts an example of cannibalism as “questionable survival method” on a grand scale. The film is based on Harry Harrison’s dystopian novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966). A structural food shortage due to overpopulation and pollution has created a dystopian setting. The story ends with the uncovering of a well-organised, secret government scenario supported by the Soylent Corporation, which employs the processing of human flesh as a primary food source. Accordingly, civilians were not exposed to a moral conflict, which remained limited to the government, who seem to have overcome the
associated moral dilemma. Most people continued to be unaware of eating a food product made of human remains, at least, until the protagonist find out “Soylent Green is people!”
In Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic novel The Stand (1978), a character called Lloyd wrestles with his moral principles. He is on the verge of committing a
cannibalistic act and is locked in prison while the outside world has succumbed to a pandemic of Biblical proportions. He is marooned in his cell without food or chance of escape, while a leg of one of the prison guards is sticking through the bars of his cell. “There were teeth-marks there. Lloyd knew whose teeth had made those marks, but he had only the vaguest memory of lunching on filet of [the prison guard]. All the same, powerful feelings of revulsion, guilt, and horror filled him” (King 515). The last scene demonstrates how Lloyd is experiencing a moral dilemma, and is more explicit on the “questionable” aspect of the survival method.
The Road also provides a literary testing ground for cannibalistic behaviour in a survival setting. The setting is a world completely destroyed by an undefined disaster, and its characters are constantly on the brink of starvation or hyperthermia. Natural food resources have been depleted, the world’s population is decimated, and the temperature never seems to rise to comfortable levels again. The following passage from The Road describes a world on the verge of a moral and physical transformation, in which people would eat human flesh and ransack through what is left of cities:
A world soon populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who
tunnelled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early […]. (192)
This passage appears to be prophetic. Later, the man and the boy witness a gruesome scene during one of their searches for food. Following a trail of smoke and a smell of cooking, the man notices a fire has just been abandoned. “They left their food
cooking” (211). The man suspects the people who lit the fire fled because “they saw we had a gun” (211), and they might have been ashamed of what they were doing: “What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I’m sorry, he whispered. I’m sorry” (212). This scene is very unsettling to the boy. The boy is upset, because his moral compass is guided by his father’s experience to see the difference between people who “eat other people” and people who “dont” (304). Evidently, a moral framework is present regarding this difference. The boy has gained an understanding of a moral concept in the form of a universal law in which good people “carry the fire” (136), whereas bad people, amongst other things, “eat people” (304). His intuition to trust new people serves this principle, as demonstrated by the following conversation, just after the man has died:
How do I know you’re one of the good guys? You don’t. You’ll have to take a shot.
[…]
You don't eat people. No. We don't eat people. And I can go with you? Yes. You can.
The boy seems to think that the only relevant question to ask in order to trust these people, is whether they “eat people” and are therefore “bad” (304). The moral principle is, that bad people eat people.
In reference to the metaphor of the father and son being marooned in a changed world with different morals and means of survival to their own, they are both depicted by the narrator as the more civilised in the world of The Road. In fact, the
“bloodcults,” “road-agents,” or “marauders,” represent the natives in The Road, but the names signify the same idea in the us-versus-them framework of the father. The father and his son distinguish themselves from the metaphoric natives they encounter through their innate ethics.
The man and his son apply the good-and-bad principle as a universal law of ethics, believing their conduct will lead to salvation, if only for the son. For such a presentation of ethics “at work,” so to speak, McCarthy is indebted to Romantic thought. In his Lectures of Ethics Kant took a stand against cannibalism, and explained how it diminishes the possibility of a moral construct:
[Humans] have, indeed, no inclination to enjoy the flesh of another, and where that occurs, it is more a matter of warlike vengeance than inclination; but there remain in him an inclination that may be called appetite, and is directed to the enjoyment of the other. This is the sexual impulse. [As] soon as anyone becomes an object of another’s appetite, all motives of a moral relationship fall away. (27: 384-386)
have resulted in a lack of “motives for a moral relationship.” This is how their society functions in relation to their need for survival. From this can be concluded that the Father and Son form one society, and the cannibals another. In The Road, the moral framework of the man and the boy opposes the one of the cannibals, and from the way in which the novel uses the father and the son as focalizers, it is conceivable, in line with Kant’s reasoning, that the cannibals do not have any.
The idea of two post-apocalyptic societies evolving divergently, recalls the cultures of the Morlocks and the Eloi as presented in The Time Machine. To a certain extent, Wells’ novel also depicts an irreversible decline of humankind. As opposed to The Road’s suggested fate of the world, in The Time Machine, humankind has
survived in a distant future, and has developed into two humanoid races: the cunning, cannibalistic Morlocks and their source for food, the gentle Eloi. Published in 1895, The Time Machine extended the Romantic fascination for exploring life after death, on the grandest scale. Where Godwin turned to the immortality of alchemy in St Leon (1799) to explore through one man’s eyes the socio-political developments of
centuries, and Shelley relied primarily on the powers of his own poetic genius to visualise the death and rebirth of mankind, Wells’ protagonist is able to take a look into the future by means of a quintessential science fiction device called a time machine.2 The vehicles are different but the literary purpose is the same. Like
Shelley’s “Last Man,” the protagonist of The Road survives an apocalypse to witness his own future. The similarity with The Time Machine in regard to The Road also lies in the plot element that in the distant future of The Time Machine, all forms of moral and supernatural authority seem to have become obsolete. All forms of devotion are 2
Stephen Burt explains that The Time Machine “offers a new symbol for the afterlife in almost every chapter, combining its extrapolations of social trends (class separation) and physical trends (entropy)” (173).
directed towards the hollow idol of a sphinx, and the Eloi and Morlocks represent the good and bad in Well’s novel, but their spiritual behaviour does not indicate any need for a hope in a different future. Nevertheless, whereas the symbol of fire, as token of goodness and hope, remains the moral focus of the narrative in The Road, the
corresponding focus in The Time Machine is just the time traveller’s hope to return to his own past.
McCarthy’s protagonist acts like a metaphoric time traveller – or Romantic Immortal – to some extent, as he is able to explore the afterworld in the context of post-apocalyptic survivalism. While “Wells’ Time Traveller becomes [tomb raider], discovering secrets that belong to the dead” (Burt 173), McCarthy’s protagonist is also stranded in a horrible future, and finds out that most of mankind has reverted to savagery and cannibalism. The cannibals of The Road are like a group of stranded sailors in time. These bloodcults have chosen for the principle of survival through cannibalism. However, according to earlier relevant examples in this chapter, all persons or characters who commit acts of cannibalism had to find a way to live with themselves after, were sometimes accused for the immoral behaviour on their return or experienced the guilt following their “questionable methods” (Brooks 364).
In McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic narrative, there is no one left to pass judgment on the cannibal’s practices, but the father feels obliged to create a situation in which his son is able to live with a clear conscience. He educates him according to his own principles, hoping his son is strong enough to survive the hostile world of The Road. The moral framework he and his son have created, serves this purpose. Nevertheless, despite the father’s efforts and intentions, it is only a hollow principle. His son has to live the remainder of his life in an empty world. This world, as the narrative explicitly indicates several times, is not yet void of people, but it is deprived of all natural
resources. This leaves the boy no chance of survival, and eventually, there will be no life left to experience any form of guilt, and the use of any moral framework will vanish with the death of the last human on earth.
1.3: Ethical and Psychological Perspectives on Suicide in The Road and Other Apocalyptic Narratives
Suicide is also a returning element in apocalyptic fiction. As will become evident in this part of the chapter, the innate ethical nature of suicide in apocalyptic fiction comes closer to a form of self-euthanasia than an act of suicide associated with mental disorders. The focus in much apocalyptic fiction is on individual psychology, the individual’s choice and will, rather than lack of reasoning. According to Day,
Romantic thinkers were equally preoccupied with “the psychological capacities of the individual” (76). This part of the chapter will therefore discuss ethical and
psychological perspectives on suicide, in which suicide is presented as an extreme alternative to the moral dilemmas, or sufferings, the survivors in The Road encounter as individuals.
According to recently conducted research, the “nature of the motivation to die by suicide is often ambivalent, transitory, and impulsive ” (Hunt et al. 31), suggesting it is usually committed as an unplanned act, during a temporary lapse of reason. However, when the world is on the verge of confirmed destruction, or has already succumbed to it, life’s expectations are overshadowed by a verifiable anticipated suffering instead of an irrational notion of it. This verifiability refutes Michael Cholbi’s statement that “individuals may often lack a clear sense of their desires, current or future, to be in a position to rationally determine to whether suicide
advances their interests or well-being” (82). Although, this perspective might even place The Road’s protagonist in a position of liability by lacking a clear sense of current and future (82), as he puts himself and his son at risk by wanting to stay alive. The following literary examples of suicide highlight a shift in suicidal motivation in comparison to common, actual forms of suicide. These examples indicate a sense of despair in the individual, in the face of an actual pending doom for all humanity.
In Neville Shute’s On The Beach, the mentioned justifications for suicide are not explored until the end of the novel, which coincides with the end of the world. This novel is therefore able to emphasise another side of the human psyche and demonstrates the human ability to deny endings. The Road is similar to On The Beach in the way that it depicts the inevitability of the choice between suffering and suicide. In On The Beach, a nuclear cloud is heading in the direction of the last people still alive in Australia after a nuclear war on the northern hemisphere, and these people have no chance of escaping its doom. Therefore, they do not seem to need any justification to commit suicide, the alternative being the excruciating pain and suffering of radiation poisoning. Again, this is a choice between suffering or immediate death.
Aside from death by radiation poisoning, suicide is the only alternative in On The Beach. Nearly all characters commit suicide or euthanasia. The characters do not discuss the ethics of taking their lethal supplements—they all just accept their
medicine. “I like mine chocolate coated” (Shute 288). Suicide is the only way to take control over their hopeless situation, and at least the pills are a means to choose where they spent their last day on earth. The Road’s protagonist wants to, but is unable to, save his wife from committing suicide. The woman was also prepared to kill the boy to save him from the anticipated horrors that await them. In reference to the collective
suicide in On The Beach, and the decision of The Road’s woman, Michael Cholbi explanation signifies the rationality and validity of such suicides:
A rationally autonomous suicide must [be] one in which an individual not only meets both the cognitive and interest conditions, but also, on the basis of […] adequate understanding of [the] situation, values and future, rationally chooses to end a life that is not, on the whole, worth living any longer. (92)
In The Road, where the only prospects in life are violence and deprivation, one can either choose to live and suffer, or to die and escape it. This is a choice that is made on an individual level, as the plot illustrates.
The woman’s motives to commit suicide resemble the motives of euthanasia. She says, “We’re the walking dead in a horror film” (7), claiming they are as good as dead, and referring on the horrors in they will witness and experience in their time. Of course, she and her family are not biologically dead, but to her, everything that will happen from thereon will only be a “meaningless” (58) extension of life without any quality or development, without “argument, because there is none” (59). She frees herself of any ethical dilemma, and decides death is the way to prevent suffering.
The woman is able to commit suicide without any restrictions. Lawful
intervention or punishment are absent, because in her world, all forms of jurisdiction have disappeared. The only social background to create a moral framework present is her husband. Nevertheless, the last thing the man is able to say to his wife is, “I’m begging you” (60). He feels a moral duty to keep her from killing herself, but fails to do so eventually because of her severe determination to end her life. Despite the fact that the man feels his wife is about to make an immoral decision, her decision appears
“clear and unambiguous” (Brook-Gordon 83).
In one of the essays of Death Rites and Rights, the autonomous “Human Right to Die” (75) is discussed. In this essay, about an individual’s freedom of choice in control over one’s own death, a situation as the woman’s not only can be identified as “a right to die the least painful death available” (87), but also as a moral condition that is validated as soon as the only other remaining option is a slow, painful and
disgraceful death.In case of the woman’s ethical dilemma, the “self-interestedly motivation” of suicide is absent (Cholbi 66). She clearly stated that she believed that they were “going to rape” them (McCarthy 58), but she “couldnt wait for it to happen” (58).
The woman is the only character in the narrative who breaks with universal morality as presented by the Husband. In presenting the wife’s suicide as a decision that stands at odds with that of the protagonist, The Road again reveals a debt to Kantian thought. Michael Cholbi comments that for Kant “one’s happiness could never justify suicide […] no matter how awful or prolonged that unhappiness is” (66). The woman wishes to commit a form of suicide by shooting herself, in fear of the unavoidable horrors of the apocalypse: the ultimate and final transformation of the world into something unbearable and unrecognisable; the innate ethics of the Husband leaves him and his son to “carry the fire.”
In Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the external elements of violence and deprivation are on the verge of being internalised by its protagonist, Robert Neville. The world has succumbed to a bacterial infection, turning humans into vampires. When the vampires take him eventually, he becomes infected. At the moment when death is imminent, he knows, rebirth as a vampire will follow. He is given pills, making his death easier to bare. Neville understands he is the only real human left and
because of that feared by this new race of beings. Consequently, he realises,
“normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man” (160). By the time he realises this, he has not been the standard for the original human species for a long time, but this new race of previously infected human has. Ironically, this new race has also found ways to avoid being violent. For Neville, his death just means a personal transformation, away from the suffering and the loneliness into a sense of belonging.
While Neville is able to leave one world only to enter a new one, in The Road transformation is impossible, as the world is no longer capable of sustaining life. The man’s wife is unable to accept the violent horrors that will come with the new
“normalcy,” and says to the man, “You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I cant” (58). Despite her concerns, the man does accept the future in which they will encounter the death and violence predicted by his wife. The man pleas for his wife’s endurance, but to no avail, “You have no argument because there is no argument” (58). The ethical dilemma posed by the narrative: a mother willing to kill her own child to protect him, and a father refusing to join them. However, because of this refusal, the son and the father remain alive.
The man’s wife wanted to protect her child from the horrors women and children are vulnerable to, and which are usually associated with war, famine, and other forms of deprivation. She says, “Sooner 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 […]” (58), predicting an outcome, which she thinks plausible with an almost empirical conviction, and not entirely without reason, when read in light of Susan Brownmiller’s research on violence against women: “triumph over women by rape has become a measure of victory.” This substantiates the woman’s accuracy of her
prediction of how women are the first to become victims in times of conflict and war. Furthermore, during these periods, “women [are] simply regrettable victims -
incidental , unavoidable casualties - like civilian victims of bombing, lumped together with children” (Brownmiller). These matters are likely to have been the concerns of the man’s wife, consequently the motive for her suicide.
The suicide of the man’s wife, reflects on the man’s social detachment. For example, when the boy sees another child, he tries to help the group to which the child belongs. The man is startled and is afraid of social contact with the other. He clearly fears the people representing the new “normalcy,” as did his wife. The boy is
inconsolable and refuses to listen to his father. He is unable to experience his father’s detachment, because he possesses no memory of the time before “the event,” and has nothing to detach from:
“There’s no one to see. Do you want to die? Is that what you want? I dont care, he said, sobbing. I dont care.
The man stopped. He stopped and squatted and held him. I’m sorry, he said. Dont say that. You musnt say that.” (89)
Later, the narrative continues on the man’s behalf, by revealing that “some part of him always wished it to be over” (163), suggesting he too appears not to be immune to his wife’s death wish. Because the boy and the man are constantly moving, even though food is scarcely to be found, the journey reflects the man’s refusal to die, rather than an attempt to survive. In the world of The Road, there is nothing left to control but one’s life.
1.4: Conclusion
This chapter has shown that The Road’s narrative depicts radicalised ethical criteria, focalised by its protagonists, based on the use of cannibalism in relation to the construction of its moral framework. The act of cannibalism in The Road could be regarded as “survival cannibalism” in regard to the narrative’s setting, but its protagonists do not make this distinction. They refer to it as a morally condemnable act, and the act is depicted as such by The Road’s narrator. In regard to suicide, the narrative focuses on respect for human life and fear of a violent future. In the narrative, the motif of cannibalism is regarded from an ethical perspective, and suicide from a more psychological perspective. Furthermore, these perspectives on both survival cannibalism and suicide appear to be recurring motifs in Post-Romantic apocalyptic science fiction that can be traced back to Kantian ethics.
Chapter 2: The Symbol of Fire and the Religious Propensities of Hope in The Road
2.1: Introduction
The Road uses fire as a symbol of hope from a religious perspective, and the protagonists’ moral framework to substantiate it. This chapter will show that The Road’s apocalyptic narrative explores the theme of hope, and the ethical positions that are attributed to the various characters in The Road. While doing so, it will also show that McCarthy’s imagery is not only very similar to Romantic imagery of hope, but that in fact similar philosophical ideas are expressed in similar figurative language.
In exploring how the father and son’s act of hope is substantiated, Kantian theories will be used to address two ethical propensities towards the act. First of all, the father and son’s moral framework exists to create a better chance of a future for the boy: this addresses the practical propensities towards hope. Secondly, the symbol of fire, as used in The Road, addresses religious propensities towards the act of hope, which is speculative of nature. Kant regarded hope as a rational act, first of a
practical, and secondly, of a speculative tendency.
The moral framework of The Road’s protagonists is indebted to another theory of Kant, in which the foundation of morality is based on the awareness that persons differ from things, because persons have an intrinsic worth and dignity, beyond physical value. In his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant argues that “morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an end in himself […]. Morality, and humanity as capable of it, is that which alone has dignity” (51). By treating other people as things, in this case food, the cannibals risk becoming things themselves and as such destroy human dignity, and with it hope for a
future regeneration of mankind.
In this distinction lies the drama of the man’s family. By denying the value of her own life, his wife distances herself from her humanity and dignity. Nevertheless, even the man sometimes fails to see the dignity - “He’s going to die anyway,” but then the boy corrects him by saying: “He’s just hungry, Papa” (277). The Road clearly explores the distinction between the moral and immoral through the concept of human dignity and hope for the future. As the father and son continue to treat other people guided by their innate moral framework, separating the good from the bad, the boy’s future, significantly, remains open.
2.2: The Fire: A Secular and Religious Symbol of Hope
Hope can be projected through many symbols. One of the main symbols of hope in The Road is fire, which is not only a biblical, but as this chapter will show also a Romantic symbol of hope. The main characters of The Road act on hope for a future, to be reached by carrying “the fire” (136). The father fails to answer the question on what is to be reached. The mother, who did give an answer by describing her vision of their future, has committed suicide. She answered by saying their future could mean nothing but a time of anguish and misery to their family (58). The father refuses to give in to his wife’s wish to commit suicide together. Words of the last discussion before her death haunt the man’s dreams and thoughts. Even though, she did not live long enough to influence the boy’s upbringing, she does so, indirectly, through the father’s efforts to protect and take care of his son. He has chosen life, not death, and therefore feels the obligation to fulfil his own covenant: “to take care” of the boy, “appointed to do that by God” (80).
is described as “the light of the world” (King James, Matthew 5: 14-16), but it also represents the Holy Spirit (Luke 3: 17). In almost the same biblical language, the boy undermines his father’s remark of him not being “the one who has to worry”
(McCarthy 277). He replies with “Yes I am, he said. I am the one" (277). The
suggestion of the boy being a messianic character implies the resilience of sympathy as a universal human trait. Along the road, the boy has a tendency to help the lost and the weary, making no distinction between their intentions. Unlike his father, who represents the old-world generation, he believes they should be left unharmed and unpunished; even if it means putting their survival at risk.
Besides this messianic reference, the fire remains a symbol of hope as a precept of the man’s resilience to follow the road, leading his son to the south in the hope of a better future. When Moses is appointed by God to lead the Jewish people to the Promised Land, they are guided as described in the following passage. “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night” (Exodus 13: 21). The fire symbolises a guide to a better state.
In a Romantic context, in Byron’s Darkness “dying embers” represent a lack of hope, while Percy Shelley would turn to fire as a symbol of knowledge, and a beacon of hope, in an early sonnet:
Bright ball of flame that through the gloom of even Silently takest thine aethereal way,
And with surpassing glory dimm'st each ray Twinkling amid the dark blue depths of
Heaven,--Unlike the fire thou bearest, soon shalt thou Fade like a meteor in surrounding gloom,
Whilst that, unquenchable, is doomed to glow A watch-light by the patriot's lonely tomb; A ray of courage to the oppressed and poor;
A spark, though gleaming on the hovel’s hearth, Which through the tyrant’s gilded domes shall roar;
A beacon in the darkness of the Earth; A sun which, o'er the renovated scene,
Shall dart like Truth where Falsehood yet has been.
As in Shelley’s poem, the use of the symbol of fire as a projection of hope for survival, becomes a focal point in The Road. Its effect refutes the arguments of the man’s wife, proving the boy can be taken care of and be protected against the immoral and bloodthirsty cannibals of the new world. The symbol remains a beacon of hope to the father, and to the son a guide of righteousness through many ethical dilemmas and dangers.
Despite this moral compass, the boy does not know what to hope for in the future. To him, the question remains unanswered. The boy continues his life, carries the fire and the burden of hope after his father’s death, and finds new “good guys” (303). The purpose of his life is the maintenance and development of a universal set of morals of “good” and “bad,” and by its continuation hoping to meet others who are good, consequently surviving the savage circumstances of a destroyed world.
Curiously, the boy never wonders what the future might bring him, but only whether there will be others that are good. Does the boy’s moral compass ensure a better future?
This question might be found in Kant’s theories of hope. According to his theories, hope itself can be regarded and acted upon from two ethical attitudes and
perspectives. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant theorised on a question of hope: “If I act as I ought to do, what may I then hope? - is at once practical and theoretical. The practical forms a clue to the answer of the theoretical, and speculative question” (Section II). Here Kant argues that to hope for something can be a rational act, even though the outcome is unsure at the same time. He continues that, as a rational act, hope requires empirical grounds to trust that the desired or projected outcome of hope is possible at all. If not, only the speculative, mostly religious, question based on belief remains possible. From this can be deduced that, in Kant’s theory, hope, through a perspective of universality, balances between rationality and belief.
Section 2.3 will discuss this Romantic notion of universality in more detail, because it is particularly applicable to the idea of hope in The Road. In its story, the planet is completely destroyed, and nothing is left to hope for in a rational sense. For example, in reference to Kant’s “practical question,” the mother’s rational perspective on the future placed her in an existential crisis. This crisis made her long for death, because to her it seemed a better place than amongst the living. In respect to the man’s disposition of responsibility towards his son, the only option to him is the “theoretical question.”
All the following sections will take Kant’s treatise Religion within the Boundaries of Reasons as a philosophical framework for studying the concept of hope. In Religion, Kant states that people possess innate tendencies, for example, towards “a natural propensity of the human being to do [good or] evil” (Part one). His most recurring descriptions of his concept of hope in Religion are of an attitude towards these tendencies. Kant’s perspective on human attitudes becomes evident in his explanation of natural human “propensities,” in which people are either inclined to be morally good or evil. Kant scholar, Vida Pavesich, explains that, according to
Kant:
such a theory of underdetermination-compensation applies to each and every member of the human species regardless of their differences and thus has the potential to ‘ground’ normative claims that can be made on behalf of all human beings. (4)
Uncompromising and radical as Kant’s perspective is, The Road’s demonstrates a similar perspective on the previously mentioned propensities. Another Romantic debt shines through the way in which the characters are described with the same radical tendencies towards hope, and according Pavesich it is a debt “that could chart how a species plagued by unruly passions could realize the highest good in history in the form of a cosmopolitan world order” (2). Here, Pavesich points at the international and universal properties of an exploration of the ethics of hope.
2.3: The Moral Radicalisation of People’s Characters in Regard to Hope The Road’s narrative describes a moral radicalisation of people’s characters in a post-apocalyptic setting. According to Frank Kermode, “the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under [the] ways of making sense of the world” (28). The setting of The Road creates a hopeless situation for most of its characters, which in its turn results in a radical situation of survival. The hopelessness of the setting mainly comes from the scarcity of food and the means to produce it. The radicalisation of people’s character is depicted through the man and boy’s division between the “good guys” and “bad guys.” The “good guys” always do what morality desires, and the “bad guys” do not. Of course, it is never that straightforward, but the moral compass of the fictional characters in The Road is generally radicalised and simplified. These
generalisations and radicalisations classify the narrative as a late exercise in Kantian metaphysics.
Much like the child voices of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789), the boy has a radically good character. He has no memory of the “vanished world” (147), as he was born after the apocalypse. Nearly all cultural signs posts that gave moral directions towards the “good” have been eradicated. In this empty world, children are born as a perpetual instead of an initial “tabula rasa,” in the Aristotelian sense,
because there is hardly anything left to write with. The only development in the boy’s moral compass seems to be the ability to sever the “good guys” from the “bad,” consequently proving his ability to recognise morally desirable behaviour (136).
The man tells the boy stories he remembers from the past. They are stories “of courage and justice as he remembered them” (42). “Those stories are not true,” the boy complains (286). He argues, “In these stories we help people, but we never help people” (287), meaning they usually only help themselves. Even if they are not true, these stories reflect the father’s ideals. Regarding his ideals, the man strictly keeps to his moral code, as he does not “eat people” (304), and he will “never give up” (299). Despite his moral fortitude, he does possess a weakness. The man has been
traumatised by many of the events since the unspecified event, and his the death of his wife. As a result, he seems to have lost the ability to trust others. Father and son start out being “each the other’s world entire” (6), but as the story develops, they start to discuss their moral differences on the subject of trust. Eventually, the boy does prove he is able to trust others, which is a quality needed for hope of a future with other “good guys.”
The boy’s ability to trust others develops and becomes more evident with every encounter with other survivors. These encounters are always accompanied by moral
discussions in a father-and-son dialogue, or by the inner-monologue of the father through a limited third-person narrative. Initially, the father tries to comfort his son, and share his own views on morality regarding survival. The father has created a moral framework that allows the boy to continue and retain hope for survival; the boy recognises that besides evil, there can still be good in the world.
Despite the father’s moral perspective, and his steadfastness and resilience against his illness, he is remains afraid that “he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own” (195). The narrative frequently focuses on this agnostic crisis, the father’s personal sense of loss of “things no longer known in the world” and the compassion he once had (139). Unlike his father, the son shows an altruistic character.
As the father prays for hope, the boy begs for mercy and respect for others. The boy’s compassionate character surfaces in scenes as the one cited below:
What do you want to do?
Just help him, Papa. Just help him. The man looked back up the road.
He was just hungry, Papa. He's going to die. He's going to die anyway.
He's so scared, Papa. (277)
In comparison to the boy, the father more readily acts on primal and individual emotions in terms of survival, by saying he is “scared” in the cited scene. As a result, the father takes all of the other walker’s belongings, including his clothing, so the man can pose no threat to him and his son.
