The Road: Foil 2 key examples

The brief quibble points to the pair’s differences in age and character. Wizened by loss and grief, the man prioritizes survival and pragmatism. He represents thrift at its finest, foraging morel mushrooms from the forest floor, repairing the broken shopping cart, and rooting through abandoned ships for yellow rubber boots. But the advantages of survival sometimes come at the expense of generosity. Though the man doesn’t succumb to cannibalism or robbery, he nonetheless struggles with the selfish demands of survival. Where he isn’t maximally inventive he is also paranoid, perking his ears for gang members or shifting camp sites in the middle of the night for fear of followers. The same instinct for survival provides the occasional license for ruthlessness. He punishes the thief for stealing their cart and refuses to offer food for Ely, the vagrant beggar they pass along the road. Through its portrait of the man, “The Road” demonstrates the potential for desperate survival to devolve into reckless violence.

The boy acts as a counterbalance to these darker impulses. The man’s wariness gets tempered by the boy’s naivete and generosity. The boy spares the thief from the man’s rage-triggered pistol, just as he pleads to give Ely canned fruit. He says grace in the bunker to thank those who left their supplies behind.  McCarthy casts the son in semi-religious terms. The man dreams of his boy as a “golden chalice” and opens the novel proclaiming his son as “the word of God.” Ely almost mistakes the boy for an “angel” despite his renunciation of faith. This loving, youthful spirit exerts a moral force that defies the meagerness of their surroundings. The boy seemingly keeps the man’s behavior in check by asking him if they are still “the good guys.” The novel invests in the boy a divine, redeeming kind of innocence that holds steady even as the world around them dissolves into madness.

The man—in his restless will to live—understands survival as a fundamental end in itself. He assures his son that they will live every time such doubts arise, and he promises the boy that they will “keep going down the road.”  His motto of “carrying the fire” is a mantra of spreading hope but also a more basic resolve to continue living. He finds food, outwits gang members and enemies, and brings his son successfully into the south. Life, no matter how formless or impoverished, is better than none. “I think it’s pretty good. It’s a pretty good story. It counts for something,” he reminds the boy as they reflect on their “real life.”

The same, slim chances of survival that inspire the man discourage his wife. One of the novel’s flashbacks shows an exchange between the man and his wife the night before she ends her life. As a foil to the man, his wife is daunted by the cruelty of this post-apocalyptic reality and accordingly less optimistic about the odds of living. She would rather have “eternal nothingness” than confront the inevitability of death, leaving behind the man in exchange for freedom from this world:

I dont care. It’s meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.

Cite this Quote

Death is not a lover

Oh yes he is.

After this moment, the man must part ways with his wife. He lives; she dies. In a story that is partly about the search for reasons to live, this foil dramatizes the tension between two competing outlooks on life.