Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel, the Road,

¶ … Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the Road, and the paper will be written from a feminist perspective. And before addressing what gave Cormac McCarthy the inspiration to write his and describing the book - along with critically analyzing the dynamics between father and son against the cruel and brutal world they live in - it is important to define feminism.

Too often - especially when males are asked - the definition of "feminism" becomes narrowed down to matters of discrimination based on gender. This is part of what feminism is about. Amy Richards (www.feminist.com) writes that a common misconception is that feminism is solely about "women's issues," but it is also about fairness, civil rights, and the peace movement. In the same article, novelist Alice Walker - who coined the phrase "womanism" - writes that her version of feminist thinking includes these ideas: a feminist is committed to "the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female," and a feminist is "traditionally universalist..."

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu) feminism is described as offering a "...wide range of perspectives on social, cultural, and political phenomena," including topics on the family, globalization, human rights, popular culture, science, sexuality and race. Feminism brings to the table "ways of asking and answering questions, constructive and critical dialogue...and new topics of inquiry."

How did novelist McCarthy get the idea for writing the Road, a grim yet beautifully written story about a father and son trying to survive after an apocalypse of some sort had scorched the nation? McCarthy was interviewed on "Oprah" in early June 2007, his first interview with the media about his widely acclaimed novel. In fact, McCarthy rarely if ever talks with the press about himself or his work, preferring to let his novels "speak" for themselves. But he sat down with Oprah Winfrey at the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico and explained that while he normally doesn't have a specific event happen in his life that leads to the writing of a novel, in this case he can trace the origins of the Road to a trip he took with his young son in El Paso, Texas, four years ago.

From his hotel window in El Paso, in the middle of the night (with his son asleep in the room), McCarthy told Oprah that he "...had this image of these fires up on the hill...and I thought a lot about my little boy." He wrote some of his thoughts and impressions down, and a few years later, the idea for the Road emerged in his mind; "There was a book, and it was about that man and that little boy," he told Oprah. McCarthy said the fact that he had a very young son as an older man "...wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things fresh."

Also, in his interview, McCarthy said that he was once so poor, he was thrown out of the hotel (which was only $40 a month) because he could not pay the rent; but "Just when things were really, really bleak, something would happen," he explained. For example, when he lived in a "shack in Tennessee" and could not afford a tube of toothpaste, a free sample came in his mailbox.

In the Road, there were no free samples of toothpaste, but father and son did survive being very poor and homeless and destitute by scrounging and being innovative as they crossed the burned-out country. And in the Road, there is no happy ending and there is no lucky break that saves the father from death. The feminist view of a father and son eking out an existence in such a dangerous world involves a protective theme. The mother / wife cares very deeply about the safety and well being of her son and husband. Women have the maternal strength and vision to project into a story like this one. The caring and loving female mind prays intuitively for the man and the boy.

Conflict is a prominent theme in the Road," writes Jessica Flack, a Research Fellow at the Sante Fe Institute (published in Oprah's Book Club, "The Themes"). The nuclear apocalypse, if that is what caused the destruction of the country, was undoubtedly the work of males, as wars inevitably are, resulting from a political and nationalistic-fueled conflict that escalated into a conflict with unimaginable consequences for families and humanity.

Conflict is also shown through the "bands of marauding men"; though the disagreements between father and son "about whether to help fellow survivors"; and conflict is clearly on display through the entire scene of devastation which places an unbelievable and inhuman challenge in front of the man and boy, Flack explains. All of these are conflicts, that from the feminist view, are terribly unfair and beyond anyone's control. The Road shows the reader clearly what the world would be like if male political leaders use the ultimate power at their disposal (nuclear weapons) in the Middle East, or anywhere, to gain power over their enemies.

On page 67 of the Road the little boy is "...shivering like a dog...with the final onset of dark the iron cold locked down and the boy by now was shuddering violently." The cold - both the cold temperature and the chilling reality of life on the edge of death and amidst the dead bodies and signs of death - and the lack of blankets and warm outer clothing are continuing themes of the book.

A mother would tuck her child in, during good times, and during bad times, she would put her life on the line to protect her son. She would probably not overtly lie to her son, but the father lies constantly in the Road, believing by protecting his son from the truth he is making him safer. On page 156 of the novel, the father says, "You don't believe me." The son answers, "I believe you." "Okay," says dad. "I always believe you," the son adds. "I don't think so," says the father. "Yes I do. I have to," the son admits. Therein lies the truth about these little white lies the father tells the son throughout the book. What choice does the son have but to believe the father? If his mother was there, he could go to her to verify that what his dad said was true. But there is no mother in this story, and the deception the father continues to use on his son opens the door to questions about the value of parental honesty.

How could a father attempt to tell his son anything but the truth, when the stench of rotting bodies and signs of mass death are everywhere? The reality of the situation was too grim for any little boy in normal times to have to understand, but these were not normal times. In all likelihood, a mother would have been more honest with a son, and yet she would have comforted him on a deeper level that perhaps the father was able to.

On page 90, "They followed a stone wall past the remains of an orchard...he'd seen it all before. Shapes of dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled away." And the wall beyond the orchard, fully visible to the son and to the father, "held a frieze of human heads, all faced alike, dried and caved with their tout grins and shrunken eyes."

That is not to say the father and son were not genuinely affectionate toward each other. They were, indeed, closely attached to each other in physical and emotional ways. The boy did keep his dad honest in some respects, though. On page 34, they were sitting around the fire watching snow melt in the flames and dad fixes a little bit of hot cocoa for the boy and pours a cup of just plain hot water for himself. "You promised not to do that," said the boy. The father asks "What?" "You know what, Papa." So the father pours his hot water back into the pan on the fire and takes the boy's cup and pours some of the boy's cocoa into his own cup.

I have to watch you all the time," said the son, sounding like a parent scolding a child rather than a child scolding a father. "If you break little promises you'll break big ones. That's what you said," the boy continues. "I know," dad replies. "But I won't." But he did tell untruths. On page 135 the father said, "Everything's okay. I promise." But the boy was smarter than that by now and clearly seemed to understand the dire predicament they were in. When the father bent down to look at the boy's face "under the hood of the blanket he very much feared that something was gone that could not be put right again." It was the point at which the father was coming to grips with the totality that had reached deep into his son's consciousness and spirit.