Hope For Hope

In his novel "The Road," Cormac McCarty narrates the experience of a father and his son as they survive a natural disaster that has wiped most of the human race. In their experience, many aspects of humanity come to light in the midst of what is an exemplary relationship between the two, characterized by a loving and patient communication. Constant flashbacks interrupt the novel format time to time, hinting towards what should have been the fathers life, the world prior to the disaster, the kid's mother, and many other things that add up to make the tragedy a real mental challenge to the two. And the memories fail to provide hope, for they narrate destruction and loss as when they get to "where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy. He turned and looked out at the waste of the yard, A tangle of dead lilac (26)." No only do we find mention of what is possibly the gayest celebration of the year on this side of the world, but we literally encounter life in the lilacs, which used to occupy space in both the garden and his memory, and now provide the magnitude of disaster, the shadow of death.

And we continue to search for some hope, almost as the characters themselves do, struggling to keep them alive as if the more we read the more their vitality burned. And we think that maybe, if we read enough, there will be a bright light and everything might begin to clear up into hope, but it isn't the case yet. But then the kid begins to show signs of that absence of hope, making the story even more shocking, for kids are supposed to be the living representation of hope, and there is no longer hope in hope. And I shall give reasons to my statement in mentioning a dream of a penguin wounded by the father, and " it was a lot scarier in the dream (36)," and then, as to complete the scene, "the winder wasnt turning (37)." In the dream, as simple and inoffensive as it might be, there where two different sources of fear, alienated from each other. The penguin obviously shocked the kid, for it was his first description, but then, even more, the winder was the real ultimatum. If it wasn't turning, then there was no air, no wind, no movement, nothing. And that is probably his fear: nothing. And I don't mean nothing in a sense of no fear, but of nothingness, of the absence of.

By that point we think we have read enough, that no other tragedy can possibly hit the characters, but the more we learn about their immediate past, the more we find nothingness. When we learn about the mother, I think the last thought on my mind was of her suicide. I had naively assumed she had been but another victim of the disaster, and even though in a sense she was, she was also an ally to that disaster in another sense. Her killing herself is the final demonstration of how hope is not only absent, but how its absence can make life succumb to nothingness.