Anyway……
So recently I borrowed “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy (The guy who wrote No Country For Old Men now turned into a pretty good Academy Award winning film), and I have to tell you guys….this book gives me the chills everytime I read it.
To sum it up without spoiling a ton of shit for you guys, its a story of a nameless pair: Father and Son, traveling across a post apocalyptic wasteland where an unnamed catastrophic event has destroyed all that remains, leaving nothing but crumbs and embers of what was civilization, and the “adventures” they have while traveling….if you could call them adventures. Its more like, terrifying events that happen across the proverbial hell they are traveling across.
What I really like about this book is that McCarthy adds alot of social commentary, or at least philisophical commentary if not social, throughout the story. The travels of the father and son are marred with gruesome events that many people would not dream of ever wanting to see…and its strange because its incredibly compelling.
We read post apocalyptic fiction hoping for a story about survivors kicking ass and taking names, zombies being blown to smithereens by bands of courageous surviviors looking for the last vestige of the holy human race to make a final stand before they make impossibly concieved strides to reclaim the world from the grasps of this unamed malice. However in this story, we realize that all of these truths are nullified and that this is a different sort of post apocalyptic fiction. This type of fiction takes a much more melancholy route, bagging on the philosophies and terrors of surviving and the ever present hedgehog’s dilemma of two choices we should never, ever have to make: Life or Death? In a word devoid of life besides marauding bandits waiting to kill and feast on whoever they lay their eyes on, is there a reason to go on? Should we submit to death before we reach an ever inevitable fate anyway? We never question this and rightly so because we never have to, but this theme is now as real to this father and son as the apocalyptic ash and fallout that drifts across the long and terrible road that they travel upon.
Once again, I think that this is a bit of commentary on our views and perspectives changed after an enormous and sudden rapture. We live in such safe society that, when all that has changed or has been so suddenly seized from us, our transformed nature begins to show after these events. I think it even provides a notion of even hope for hummanity. We are so foolish, yet with the example of the father and son, we still have that primal truth of survival embedded within the very core of our existence, more so amplified by the father and son’s will for survival. We also, with much hope, see that even ethics can survive in a post apocalyptic wasteland. Everything we know has blown away, our primal nature from the beginning of time has shown itself a worthy means of survival….yet when the father and son see thousands of people locked naked in a basment, waiting to be devoured, we see that the purity of the child and the aegis-like nature of the father draw away from this temptation when the son states “we’ll never eat people right?” and the father says “we will never.”He even goes on to proclaim that “we are the keepers of the flame,” an even more inspiring sense of hope in his drawn and tired words. Even when near defeat by starvation, they’re ethical resolve remains resolute, scraping by through other means rather than succumbing to the temptation of this self destructive act.
Though I have not completed the book, I can surmise all the above I’ve written as a rather quintessential theme to the book, that survival bears our true nature, yet in a sense, it is also the marker in time where we decide where we stand on the sides of survival, death or life. In the end, with the written words and proverbial spells that Cormac McCarthy bombards us with in this book, the ethical matters, the melancholy truths, the everpresent inspiration of something called “hope” in a hopeless land, we can now assume that we are all but metaphorical Shadows on the Sun, secondary to a greater scheme of things in life that determine what and who we are.
0 Responses to “Shadows On the Sun”