"Philosophers chained to a madhouse wall: The rationality of hope in Cormac McCarthy's The Road."

Michael Chiariello, St. Bonaventure University, April 27, 2013.

Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road is a deeply philosophical device

providing an imaginary context in which to explore the nature of morality, the meaning

of life and the hope that sustains them both.

The Road tells the story of a man and his son, neither are given a name, who are among

the few survivors a decade after a fiery apocalyptic event, not otherwise identified, has

destroyed almost all living things. The environment is ashen grey: "Barren, silent,

godless" as McCarthy describes it. The few human survivors live on scavenged or stolen

canned goods or resort to cannibalism. Resistance to cannibalism has become the

criterion which identifies "the good guys" such as this father and son. The pair is

travelling south in search of a warmer climate and the ocean, and trying to avoid the

thieves and cannibals along the way.

The man's wife, has already taken her own life, despite his desperate pleading, rather than

face the prospect of being raped, killed and eaten, and her suicide haunts the story. The

father recounts the final discussion he has with her. "I've taken a new lover," she says,

"and he can give me what you cannot." "Death is not a lover," he replies. "Oh yes he is,"

she countered. His entreaties are futile: "You have no argument because there is no

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argument." And looking back on "the hundred nights they sat up debating the pros and

cons of self-destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse

wall" he concedes, "she was right. There was no argument." Yet he continues on. Why?

So The Road may be read as a meditation on the hope that sustains the will to live, and to

live morally. What sustains father and son? Is it the hope in some ultimate reward in an

afterlife? Is it the belief in the fundamental goodness or dignity of human nature? Is it

the belief that through patience one may yet find or contribute to a better world, a better

life? I don't find any of these beliefs to succeed in the novel. Yet there is an

unmistakable sense of hope throughout the story, and perhaps a vindication of that hope

in the final moments of the novel.

What do we mean by hope? Is is it a belief about a probable future, an expectation? Or

perhaps, an attitude, or a predisposition to act or believe. Does its rationality depend on

the rationality of some beliefs regarding the future, regarding the prospects for success in

some undertaking? Or perhaps hope is noncognitive and therefore its rationality depends

on non-epistemic grounds. None of this is clear.

Certainly hope is anticipatory, but there is a sense of timelessness in this ruined world.

"The clocks stopped at 1:17." And the man's sense of the future is uncertain. "There is no

past ... No list of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no

later. This is later" (54). Or later, while washing the boy he thinks,"Please don't tell me

how the story ends(75)"When the boy asks, "What are our long-term goals[?]", the man

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responds, "I don't know." (160) In one scene, the man holds the remnants of a book and

muses that "he'd not thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to

come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an

expectation" (187).

Consider Immanuel Kant's view of the matter: The rationality of hope depends on the

rationality of the belief in God and the hereafter. Towards the end of his first critique, he

raises the question "For what may I hope?" For Kant this question is entailed in the

experience one has of the difficulty, maybe impossibility, of reconciling our moral

obligation to make ourselves worthy of happiness, and the attainment of happiness itself

at least in this life. Kant argues that we may hope for an after-life in which a law-giving

God rewards a moral life with eternal happiness. This hope, it may be argued, makes

rational the performance of our moral duty. But this is a circular argument: religious

belief is rational because it is implicit in morality and morality is rational because

religious belief harmonizes our moral duty with justice. As far as the rationality of hope

is concerned, Kant has already said that such theological claims, which constitute the

foundation of hope, cannot be proven or disproven. Rather they are postulates which

make rational the moral endeavor practically although not theoretically. You may call

this a circular argument, or no argument at all, or you may see this as an act of faith, what

Kant calls "moral faith."

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McCarthy's novel, however, offers little to those who seek a religious source for hope.

God is not entirely absent from this world. And it is true that in an impromptu ceremony

to thank those who had stored the food which they did not live to consume, the man says

"we hope that you're safe in heaven with God" (146). But throughout the philosophical

stance is uncertain, perhaps agnostic. God's presence, indeed existence, is almost always

conditional. For example, the man, who refers to his responsibility to his son as "his

warrant," adds, "If he is not the word of God, God never spoke." (5) Later, when he

encounters Ely, another survivor, he makes a reference to God to which Ely replies:

"There is no God." "No?" asks the man. Ely continues, "There is no God and we are his

prophets." And when he tries to understand the boy's kindness Ely suggests, "Maybe he

believes in God" to which the father replies, "I don't know what he believes in." Later,

the man finds a flare gun and fires it. He explains that it was to let someone know where

you are. "Like God?" asks the boy. "Yeah, maybe somebody like that," the man

responds.

However, he takes little comfort from such a faith. In an early scene, we find him

kneeling in the ashes looking heavenward. The man had just suffered a coughing spell,

and perhaps a recognition of his imminent death. "Are you there? he whispered. Will I

see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn

you eternally, have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered, oh God." (11-12)

Yet, as we will see, the crucial bond of moral responsibility between father and son has a

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divine source: "My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. (77)"

But what if, as he fears, he does not live to see his duty fulfilled and he must either leave

him to die or "take him along with him" to the grave? Remember that for Kant we are led

to believe that the kind of hope that leads us to postulate an afterlife solves the problem

of an unconditional obligation to do the impossible.

Or, we might consider the classic rationalist defense of hope found in such writers as

Hobbes. It is interesting to note that the world McCarthy describes is not unlike the

natural condition of humankind portrayed by Hobbes' Leviathan where individuals

pursue survival with no legal or moral barriers with the resultant "war of all against all."

Hobbes hypothesizes the emergence of the moral with the construction of society, and the

fidelity, motivated by honor and fear of the Sovereign, to the agreements that sustain it.

For Hobbes the ultimate justification of social duties is the chance for a longer and better

life. Yet this promise is absent in The Road. Indeed, life is so bleak that for the wife

death is a more appealing alternative, and suicide a rational choice. Hobbes, famously,

had little comprehension of suicide as a rational voluntary act. Such a fact would refute a

fundamental Law of Nature which is the duty of self-preservation and the cornerstone of

his system.

The absence of living things in this post-apocalyptic world has so reduced the available

food, that in addition to the competition one might find in the natural condition of

Hobbes, there is the appalling reality that the death of one becomes a condition, sufficient

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and perhaps increasingly necessary, for the survival of others. Thus the Kantian

injunction to view other persons as ends rather than means seems an impossible

expectation, as do Hobbesian and Lockean schemes to adopt a live-and-let-live social

agreement.

We return to the question posed by this novel regarding the foundations of morality, of

meaning, and of hope. Kant once suggested that hope is the foundation of morality. Is

there a foundation for hope? In McCarthy's world, where God is hidden, life has been

extinguished, and society reduced to barbarism, seems to offer nothing to support an

attitude of hope. Yet the man persists. Not only is he committed to surviving and

ensuring the survival of his son, but he strives to maintain a commitment to the ethical as

well. But all of this is without justification. So what remains of the possible sources of

hope?

The key to this question is in the relationship of father and son. Early in the novel, they

are described as "each the other's world entire" (6) and the wife states before committing

suicide that "you wont survive for yourself" (57). She claims the she would take the son

with her were it not for the father. "It's the right thing to do." And the father does not

deny that there may come a situation when it may be necessary for him to do this. Yet he

asks himself, "Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?" (29) Earlier, when the

boy lay ill, the man whispers, "I will do what I promised. ... No matter what. I will not

send you into the darkness alone" (246). But when the time is almost upon them, the

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boy begs to be taken with the father rather than be left alone. "I can't," says the father. "I

can't hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I can't" (279).

Yet father and son constitute a micro-society themselves and struggle to define and

maintain a form of morality, a mutual solidarity and a conscientious effort to present a

moral face to this bleakest of worlds. It is unclear what grounds this moral choice, but it

is clear that the struggle for survival is justified by their commitment to the moral, and

that the choice to survive is itself a moral obligation. But this is unsatisfactory; it is a

mere circle. So we must ask whether there is some independent standard to sustain these

commitments. In my opinion, the commitment is ultimately to the survival of the ethical

life itself. As he says, "the last instance of a thing takes the class with it..."

We recall that in recounting the conversation preceding the wife's suicide: "My only

hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart" (57). The boy continues

to find his mother's solution tempting: "I wish I was with my mom," he says. "You

mean you wish you were dead," comments the father. "Don't say it. Its a bad thing to

say." This is but one of several instances where the boy expresses the wish to follow his

mother into the grave, and as he had tried and failed with his wife, the man continues to

discourage this line of thinking.

More important, I think, is the moral framework the man teaches his son. It is very

rudimentary, but essentially people are either "good guys" or "bad guys" (128). Good

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guys like the man and boy follow two rules: don't eat people and don't give up. Their

self- identification as "good guys" is critical as the man tries to give his son the hope

necessary to persist. And, he tells his son that they are "carrying the fire" and therefore

have a responsibility to survive. And he adds, because we are carrying the fire "nothing

bad is going to happen to us" (83). And later, as the man takes a chance to explore an

abandoned house, he explains to his son, "This is what the good guys do. They keep

trying."

The man seems to be aware that his hope might rather be wishful thinking. As he

considers the wisdom of going to the ocean, he thinks that "he was placing hopes where

he'd no reason to. He hoped it would be brighter but for all he knew the world grew

darker and daily" (213) When the man realizes that death was imminent and that he can

go no farther, he gives the boy this advice: "you need to go on .... you need to keep

going. You don't know what might be down the road. We were always lucky. You'll be

lucky again . . . you need to find the good guys . . . you need to carry the fire" (278).

Clearly the man's hope is vindicated when the son commits to another family who

describe themselves as good guys, but are they? "How do I know that you're one of the

good guys?" the boy asks a man he encounters. "You don't. You have to take a shot," he

replies.

So hope is borne by hope, and this circle of hope is what keeps the fire burning.

But rather than basing hope on some unjustifiable belief, McCarthy finds hope in what he

cannot know: "You don't know what might be down the road."