Confronting despair with The Road

Everyone has a worst-case scenario. Cormac McCarthy helped me recognize mine and choose to live anyway.

Sometimes literature makes you confront reality in a way ordinary life can’t. Cormac McCarthy is a master at using violence and horror to reach past the comfortably numbed reader’s defenses and ask them to consider life more deeply. 

McCarthy did this for me a few years ago when I read The Road. 

Through the story of a father and son traversing a postapocalyptic wasteland, McCarthy asks if life is worth living even in the face of cannibalism, rape, and starvation. None of these atrocities affected me the way that the mother’s decision to flee these horrors through death did. 

The mother’s carefully-considered choice to end her own life to avoid suffering is a frighteningly compelling one. Her reasons are simple: “Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us.” She believes unimaginable pain is inescapable, and her fear drives her to believe that her current life has no meaning due to the overshadowing promise of destruction. Most chillingly, she states, “My only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.” 

Her despair read my despair back to me and carried it to its natural conclusion. I caught myself agreeing with the idea that in her situation it would probably be better to be dead even at your own hand, than to live.

After all, why would anyone face rape and cannibalism when they could escape it? As sympathetic as the woman’s choice might be, I could not make peace with it. How could death become better than life? And if it can, at what point of suffering does death begin to become better? 

The longer I sat with the book (and it has haunted me for years now), the more unsettled I became with the woman’s act of despair and my own tacit agreement with her choice. I had accepted that life was good as long as relief from suffering remained a possibility.  

Reading Alan Noble’s On Getting Out of Bed completely convinced me that the mother and I had both underestimated the goodness of life. 

Noble understands McCarthy in a way I didn’t in my middle-of-the-night binge-read. He acknowledges the woman’s compelling reasons for choosing death but points to beauties within the rest of the book as compelling arguments against her choice. The father sees his son as evidence of the goodness of life. He sees himself as appointed by God to protect his son to the best of his ability and teach him that life has meaning even in the face of unspeakable horror.

The father doesn’t live with deranged hope that he will escape his situation. He knows that his life will probably remain as it is until his death, but he sees with remarkable clarity that his life has meaning. He becomes attuned to tiny goodnesses around him. These bless him and bring relief. 

I think this is something most of us could stand to learn a thing or two about.  

Despite its horrific setting, this book strengthened my understanding of the goodness of life. 

McCarthy insists we confront why we’re living at its most basic level. He tears through the comforts of civilization and asks the all-important question: when tragedy inevitably arrives will you choose to live your life? He insists we look threats to the goodness of life squarely in the face. Most remarkably he concludes that life is worthy regardless of pleasure and pain, hope or despair. Life is good without exception.

In the wise words of Alan Noble: “Your existence testifies.” That is enough.