Intro
Think some degree of civilization and trust within society are things you can expect out of the world? Think again. The world of The Road is a place devoid of civilization and any social order you can count on. A father and a son travel south toward the ocean on roads that used to be managed by the United States. Some horrible, unbelievable, inexplicable (at least never by Cormac) apocalyptic event has left their world in ruin. No animals or plants live, so there can be no hunting and no agriculture.
Well, there’s hunting, but the prey are—yikes!—human beings. The remaining people scavenge for canned goods and whatever else they can find, but, not too surprisingly, it can get brutal out there. The man and the boy can trust no one, because anyone can secretly be an enemy. Kind of like high school.
McCarthy is basically taking any basic expectations for order and calm and living a normal life in society and throwing it out the window. And that’s assuming there even are windows anymore in the world of The Road. Which there probably aren’t.
Hey, this is a place where the loss of civilization has changed everybody’s whole outlook on the human race, and uncertainty and distrust are seen as the basis of the human condition. Not quite the environment for a tasteful bay window with a view of the garden.
Quote
The traveler was not one for looking back. They followed him for a while and then they overtook him. An old man, small and bent. He carried on his back an old army rucksack with a blanket roll tied across the top of it and he tapped along with a peeled stick for a cane. When he saw them he veered to the side of the road and turned and stood warily. He had a filthy towel tied under his jaw as if he suffered from a toothache and even by their new world standards he smelled terrible.
I dont have anything, he said. You can look if you want.
We’re not robbers.
He leaned one ear forward. What? he called.
I said we’re not robbers.
What are you?
They’d no way to answer the question.
Analysis
McCarthy never names the father and son. Names signify, or at least, tend to have some sort of meaning in the regular world that we’re used to, but in this ruined world they have lost significance. The father and son—and pretty much everyone else—have been robbed of any possibility of making sense of their lives, no matter what hermeneutic tool they like best.
So, what they are and who they are are questions that have lost their answers. The pair does all it can: press on without any hope, except for a death that they fear, but also somewhat long for. Uplifting, right?
Civilization is one of the fore-structures of which Heidegger wrote, not to mention a tradition in Gadamer’s vocabulary. These guys advise that you shouldn’t wait until the end of civilization to discover how the social order is something that gives meaning to the human condition.
All those rules about wash your hands, don’t cut in line, be nice to other people and stuff? Maybe there’s something to it. So use soap, or your world’ll turn into the one McCarthy shows. But until then, hermeneutics gives you the tools to understand not only The Road’s post-apocalyptic vision, but also the components of the pre-apocalyptic society we live in today.