How Did It Come To Be?

We are getting closer to the end of the book, and there’s still no clear explanation of what is going on that can help us understand the background on their situation. We know they live in an apocalyptic world, and the author adds little hints here and there that try to describe their surroundings, but as far as a straightforward explanation, there has been none. I have reached the point of thinking that there won’t be any in the future either, so I guess it is up to the reader to infer what the hell happened before that got them where they are now.

To reach a more educated evaluation, it is useful to take all the hints and put them together, to try to understand the image that McCarthy was trying to give us of their surroundings. I have heard that the apocalypse they are going through is supposedly an environmental apocalypse, so I’ll see how much proof I can find of that. 

The first idea that seems to be repeating itself is that the boy and the man are always out of water, in a constant worry of not finding more. Also, the houses they visit lack gas. When the man was searching the boat for anything that might be of use to them, he “turned on the stove and turned it off again,” when he realized it had no gas left. (226) The way the author wrote it made it seem as if it wasn’t important; as if the man had turned on the stove already expecting it to be empty. It shows that the man had probably done that a lot more times, and he had rarely had enough luck to find a stove with enough gas.

The main road in the story is littered all around, and the man and the boy don’t care about where they throw away their trash. The priorities in their life have been rearranged to include only that directly related to immediate survival, such as food, water, sleep, and clothing. The talk of taking care of the world for the children of tomorrow has been completely forgotten, because the survivors are those children, and tomorrow caught up to them.

Another recurring theme in the description of their surroundings is that everything around them is burned. Even though fire is what is keeping the man and the boy alive, it seems to also be the cause of their despair. When commenting on the death of a man, the boy asked “They were trying to get away weren’t they Papa? Yes. They were. Why didn’t they leave the road? They couldn’t. Everything was on fire.” (191) So we now know that fire was the cause of people’s displacement and consequently, their death. It may have been caused by a massive fire started by the lack of good care for the Earth, and global warming’s response to forest fires. 

Anyway, that is basically all we know, so we might as well classify it as one of those books that try to make us more aware of the consequences that could arise from global warming, and pose different options of what it could look like. So what is the moral of the story? Take care of the environment.