The Road: Motifs 5 key examples

In its immediate association with this post-apocalyptic world, ash operates as a relic of the past and an erasure of it. It is likely a remnant of the unnamed catastrophe that befell the planet, a constant reminder of the destruction that presses its aftermath upon the survivors. It is also an all-consuming force—in his childhood bedroom, it conceals the happier memories of the man’s youth and cloaks the natural world beyond. Even ice and snow—substances remembered for their untouched purity—get darkened by the ash, as though the innocence of the former world exists no longer. In this illogical, inhospitable world, “the ice was black and the creek looked like a path of basalt winding through the woods.”

But the cart’s role as the sole source of storage makes it a liability and hindrance during their travels. The man has to repair a broken wheel, maneuver it through the twisted trailer truck, and stash the cart away each night for fear of theft. In conveniently storing all of the man and boy’s possessions, the cart also places a large target on their backs. Amid a starving world, the shopping cart may still be the closest approximation to abundance. The cart gets stolen one afternoon at the beach and nearly lost, if the man and boy had not followed its tracks of sand.

Near the end of their journey, the cart comes to signify the burden of the mortal body; the weight of their physical possessions obstructs their efforts to keep moving. “The cart was so loaded it was hard to push and one of the wheels was giving out,” the man notes when they return inland from the beach. He grows weak and coughs blood, forcing the pair to abandon the cart by the roadside. Perhaps fittingly, the man dies shortly afterwards. He leaves the cart behind in the same way he does his body, letting both go at the end of his life.

Even though it constrains the man and boy to necessity, food reveals its potential for pleasure at other points. Their stay at the bunker—stocked with “crate upon crate of canned goods”—is the closest they come to a carefree, pre-apocalypse sense of normalcy. The account of “tomatoes, peaches, beans, and apricots” almost has the feel of lavish, mouthwatering luxury. The man gives his son his first taste of the “richness of a vanished world” through breakfasts of butter-bathed biscuits and scrambled eggs. The boy eats until he “looked drugged.” So otherwise defined by its lack, food provides for a brief moment of pure enjoyment.

But beyond the bunker, the struggle for food pushes the apocalypse survivors to commit all manner of risky or terrifying acts. Nowhere is this more apparent than the scene at the “tall and stately” mansion they arrive at on the outskirts of town. Reasoning that starvation leaves them with “no choice,” the man breaks open the basement doors in search of sustenance, only to find naked, huddled humans awaiting slaughter at the hands of the gang members. One of the man’s riskiest attempts to find food collides unexpectedly with the novel’s most chilling account of cannibalism yet. The moment showcases the horrifying spectrum of survival tactics. Where he and the boy turn to break-ins and shriveled apples for survival, the wandering gang members have resorted to consuming other humans. While the novel emphasizes this contrast between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” they each share a desperation for survival that drives them to extreme ends. Humans, good or bad, have been compelled by hunger to do what would have been previously unthinkable.

The man tries affirming the existence of order even as he questions it. What begins as a question about God resolves with an awareness of some supernatural knowledge. The man imagines himself as a “satellite” like the stars, and convinces himself of some overarching order through similarly cosmic appeals—the “rotunda scribing through the long day,” for instance, seemingly recalls a Foucault's pendulum in an observatory. He seeks method in madness, doing so with the terms of astronomy.

But the reverse is equally true—from method, the novel finds only madness. Other astronomic references service a sense of meaninglessness. At one moment, the novel pauses to reflect on all the senseless orbiting. Rather than finding solace in order, this passage merely emphasizes the forgettable monotony of the earth’s movement:

Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

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The novel’s interest in astronomy plays into a struggle between darkness and light, too. McCarthy uses space—which naturally lends itself to binaries between black and white—to describes the ashen Earth as well. The novel’s narration likens the light from forest fires to that of the sun or mentions the “starless dark” in passing, as if to emphasize the conflict between good and evil on the planet itself. Metaphysical concerns feed into broader, moral ones.

Through its function of preserving the past, maps come to express the novel’s thematic anxieties. Outdated roadmaps can only take the man and boy so far. After their stay on the farm, the man and boy briefly lose track of their location and end up straying 50 miles west; they must grasp at coordinates that are no longer there. Maps are instruments of navigation. But closely associated with this is the fear of a world in which all the usual landmarks and touchstones have been erased. In this frightening new world they are also reminders of loss, the disappearance of everything that was once “in its place” and “justified.” During a train of thought at one point, the narrator cries out:

How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.

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Despite its grim laments, the novel’s ending holds out hope that the past might still endure. The mention of brook trout living in the “deep glens” that are “older than man” suggests that history—and memory—continues to survive somewhere. Even more, it carries forward the paradox embodied by the man’s tattered road guides: the trout backs themselves bear “maps and mazes”—as though to suggest that losing and finding, preserving and relinquishing, have always been bound to one another.

The man tries affirming the existence of order even as he questions it. What begins as a question about God resolves with an awareness of some supernatural knowledge. The man imagines himself as a “satellite” like the stars, and convinces himself of some overarching order through similarly cosmic appeals—the “rotunda scribing through the long day,” for instance, seemingly recalls a Foucault's pendulum in an observatory. He seeks method in madness, doing so with the terms of astronomy.

But the reverse is equally true—from method, the novel finds only madness. Other astronomic references service a sense of meaninglessness. At one moment, the novel pauses to reflect on all the senseless orbiting. Rather than finding solace in order, this passage merely emphasizes the forgettable monotony of the earth’s movement:

Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

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The novel’s interest in astronomy plays into a struggle between darkness and light, too. McCarthy uses space—which naturally lends itself to binaries between black and white—to describes the ashen Earth as well. The novel’s narration likens the light from forest fires to that of the sun or mentions the “starless dark” in passing, as if to emphasize the conflict between good and evil on the planet itself. Metaphysical concerns feed into broader, moral ones.