Relating to The Road: Loving and Letting Go

I've been reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  It's written a lot like a screenplay, due to McCarthy's great knack for creating such detailed descriptions of the nothingness the characters encounter.  Actual character dialogue is sparse, but makes the relationship seem all the more intense between the boy and the man.


I recently came to a paragraph that really moved me, and I found myself reading it over and over, asking myself the same questions the character asked.  The situation is this: their lives are in danger, being threatened by 'the others.'  The man (the father) has a pistol with one shot left.  He is pondering what will happen when THE decision has to be made.  Should he save his son the misery of the torture these dangerous stalkers will certainly use on the boy?  The paragraph follows:


They lay listening.  Can you do it?  When the time comes?  When the time comes there will be no time.  Now is the time.  Curse God and die.  What if it doesn't fire?  It has to fire.  What if it doesn't fire?  Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?  Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing?  Can there be?  Hold him in your arms.  Just so.  The soul is quick.  Pull him toward you.  Kiss him.  Quickly. 


This made me wonder about THE decision.  Loving someone so much that you have to make that choice of hurting them to save them.  This choice can be as small as that saying "if you love them, set them free" all the way to the extreme situation in this book.


Unfortunately, I've had to encounter the extreme situation several times.  When a loved one has no chance of surviving an extremely debilitating injury, the decision has to be made about letting the person 'live' in a state of misery or 'saving' the person by letting them go.


I hadn't thought about that extreme type of decision in a long time.  If you've never had to make that choice, this character's dilemma probably won't be as heart-wrenching.  However, it almost brought me to my knees.  For a post-apocalyptic book, it hit me much closer to home than I thought.  The setting didn't matter in that paragraph.  It was the father's love for his son and his questioning of his own courage in making the decision.




Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing?  Can there be?