This piece was originally written in June 2022.
Controlling Chaos: Using Religion to Create Apocalyptic Order in The Road
In the beginning there is order from chaos.
The start of the earth’s story is one that we encounter frequently, most often in the myriad of religious creation myths that have circulated human communities since our humblest beginnings. As natural tellers and consumers of stories, we humans are naturally attracted to these beginnings as a way of making sense of the story of not just our existence as a species, but as individuals as well. In his article “The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling,” Cody Delistraty writes that “stories can be a way for humans to feel that we have control over the world. They allow people to see patterns where there is chaos, meaning where there is randomness.” Indeed, many creation myths focus on order in the place of chaos, featuring a God or gods who order the elements, separate light from darkness or water from land, enforce distinctions that give meaning. The strong sense of control that these religious or spiritual belief-stories provide makes a stark contrast to the scientific perspective of humanity’s beginning; a random generation of the universe from a singularly cosmic explosion, a series of atomic and anatomical happenstances that the earth was formed in a way that it could randomly generate and sustain life. Despite its basis in evidence, this science-based perspective on creation has very little value as a story; it begins without a purpose, with no intentional direction towards an ending, and therefore provides little comfort or control as a part of a larger human narrative, no “meaning where there is randomness” (Delistraty). Divinity in creation is a tool that humans have used to create control in a beginning that is chaos, to invest order where it is scarce.
Inversely, in the end there is chaos from order.
If creation myths mark the beginning of humanity’s controlling narrative, then apocalyptic literature marks its ending—a descent from order into chaos, the loss of human control despite the population’s best efforts. There is an inherent connection between these two parts of earth’s story; just as earth is formed in Genesis, so then is it destroyed in Revelations. As in myth humanity begins in a lush garden where there is no want for food, so then in prophecy or fiction does it end in a barren world where food does not grow no matter the sweat on Adam’s brow. There are few apocalyptic novels that demonstrate this connection more profoundly than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In this novel, the descent from order into chaos is nearly complete. The landscape the man and the boy[1] travel along is a bleak one—there is no spark of hope for the environment as the world’s plants have all been burned, the skies are growing increasingly gray as the days pass, and humanity has descended into cannibalistic scrounging. McCarthy himself draws attention to this connection as the man wonders how “perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be” (274). For McCarthy and his man, the events of this novel are the natural ending to things, an inevitable return to chaos.
Other scholars have read this turn into chaos as an example of McCarthy’s end to religion; just as myths formed around the creation, so then does myth die around the apocalypse. In his analysis of The Road, Robert Metcalf writes: “That the world so depicted gives the lie to providential theism, and so to virtually the entirety of religious tradition, is made explicit when their situation is described as ‘barren, silent, godless’ (4) and when the wandering old man, Ely, tells them: ‘There is no God and we are his prophets’ (143)” (Metcalf 136). However, while an initial reading of the novel might convince one that the apocalypse in The Road is an end to God and religion, I believe that McCarthy’s use of religious imagery and ritualistic action rejects the abandonment of God and religion even among the descent to chaos common in apocalyptic fiction. In fact, rather than losing God altogether in the world that is “barren, silent, godless” (4), the man is able to hold back the impending chaos of the apocalypse only because of his continued religiosity throughout the novel. He creates control in the place of chaos using the same comfort-giving narratives that humans have been telling for millennia.
Thus, McCarthy’s vision of the apocalypse is not a wholly mirror image of the creation, but instead a sort of chiral molecule, a structure that appears mirrored, but which cannot be superimposed onto itself. Not a complete fall into destruction, but a prolonged endurance of chaos that can be survived only as the man continues to impose a religious sense of control on the world around him no matter how stripped down and bleak things become. In this paper, I will demonstrate how McCarthy uses religion-as-narrative in order to create a sense of human control and hope during apocalyptic chaos, particularly as religious imagery provides purpose for the father and responsibility for the son, direction for both characters. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that McCarthy’s inclusion of religion is not intended to display the death of religion alongside the death of the world, but rather that McCarthy’s argument is for religion as a useful narrative tool used by the character themselves to create control where chaos dominates.
From beginning to end, there is control in the stories we tell.
I. CONTROL in DIVINE PURPOSE
We begin with the religious hope of the father.
In The Road, the man has little hope left. He thinks frequently about suicide, knows from his bloodied cough that he is going to die soon, and has difficulty imagining the world ever returning to what it formerly was. In the man, McCarthy has grasped one of the core functions of the apocalyptic genre—to strip a person (or humanity) down to its very core, to the center of what it means to be human without any laws or social morality in place to define who or what a person is. The man we encounter on the road has certainly been stripped, made bare of any metaphorical fig leaves that might disguise what has happened to his world. The only hopes that he expresses verbally are in the repeated lies to his son; the son asks a question (“Is the dark going to catch us?”), the father answers in a vague way intended to leave room for hope (“I dont know”), the son asks if he’s telling the truth (“It is, isn’t it?”), and the father either chooses to continue the lie or to admit to the false hope (“Come on. We’ll hurry.”) (233). Perhaps not so much expressions of hope as persistent and repetitive avoidances of the uglier truth. And in this lack of external hope, we see the lack of control the man faces. He cannot control the dark, cannot control what will happen if the dark catches, if they find strangers hiding in the buildings they raid. He can only control if he will run, not if he will survive.
However, while the man’s barren hopelessness revolves around his immediate circumstances, his internal monologue betrays a truer hope as it continues to find aspects of the divine in the world around him—particularly in his son. At the beginning of the novel, the man sees divinity within the boy as he “sat beside him and stroked his pale and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god” (75). This contrasts sharply with the image of the landscape mentioned by Metcalf—the “barren, silent, godless” country to the south (4). While the world around them has no aspect of God in it, the man finds godliness within the boy; he is a container “good to house a god,” a receptable into which the father can pour his memories and hopes for a better world. A place wherein the father can store his ideas of God and see them preserved. In this sense, the man maintains some level of purpose on the barren landscape—he cannot force the fires to stop burning or the plants to grow or the sky to turn back from gray to blue, but he can protect this golden chalice, this cup that can preserve a piece of divinity.
This godly attribution from father to son is repeated later in the novel as the boy moves ahead of his father on the road; the man cannot help but “see [the boy] standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in the waste like a tabernacle” (273, my emphasis). Like Moses and the Israelites wandering in the wilderness for decades, the man finds purpose, control, and hope in carrying with him this receptacle of God. The father cements this idea of purpose-from-religion when he tells his son “my job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?” (77). The man sees his responsibility to keep his son alive as divinely ordained—equal to the Levites whose task alone it was to carry the Ark of the Covenant. He does not live for himself any longer, having lost control of his own life as evidenced by the coughing of blood and his increasing weakness through the novel. What staves the man off from suicide is the desire to preserve this boy, this chalice, this tabernacle for an “unimaginable future.”
Purpose becomes control as the man creates rituals around his divine calling. Throughout the novel, the man creates rituals as he cares for the boy. At one point, the man is forced to wash blood and brains from the boy’s face and hair in a frozen river, bringing the boy—the chalice, the tabernacle—to a state of near freezing. The man then reflects of the ritualistic nature of his motions as he takes steps to ensure the boy’s survival: “He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” (74). Control is created as events are given significance; rather than this being a near-death experience where the son is almost lost, the father uses religion to transform it into a ceremony, an ancient anointing wherein he shares the responsibility for survival with his son. A negative memory transforms into a positive one, wherein the man controls his son’s future through newly-divine ordinance. Chaos is held at bay by ritual, and for the father that is enough to continue living.
II. CONTROL in DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY
Religion’s impact on the son’s control differs strongly from his father’s.
For while the father clearly has some sort of faith background or knowledge of religion from before the apocalypse, the son’s knowledge of religion appears quite limited. The father does not frequently talk to his son about religion or religious practices, and the only rituals they enact together are those non-religious rituals of survival, such as how they approach an abandoned house. In his essay collection Religion in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction, Manuel Broncano argues that “the son lacks any notion of divinity…God is just a discursive construct, something he has grown used to hearing about from his father, but who lacks any substance beyond words” (131). While it is true that the son’s religion is not based on a classically or Judeo-Christian sense of God, I disagree with Broncano’s statement that the son “lacks any notion of divinity” (131). The clue to McCarthy’s understanding of the son’s relationship with divinity comes at the end of the novel, after the death of the father and the son’s joining with a new group of people to travel in the wasteland. “He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt[2] forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time” (286). Just as the father found divinity, purpose, and control in keeping his father alive, so now does the son find divinity, responsibility, and control as he reaches back to his father’s past and into a world that he has never seen, preserving a morality he can only enact.
This divine responsibility the son takes on from his father—passed on through that “ancient anointing” (74) in all their unspoken rituals together—is referred to as “carrying the fire” throughout the novel and refers to the morality and humanity that the son must maintain as he moves forward into that “unimaginable future” that the father sees down the road (273). Initially, the boy relies on his ability to carry the flame to act as a protective blanket, a mantle of responsibility that somehow, illogically makes him impervious to harm despite the destruction in the world around him; when the father tells him that nothing bad will happen to them, the boy states “because we’re carrying the fire,” to which his father agrees (83). Later in the novel, as the father begins drifts further from the ideals of the fire, the son becomes the sole bearer of the fire. After going against his father’s wishes to be kind to an old man who had stolen from them, the son tells his father that he is “the one who has to worry about everything,” signaling his departure from his father’s rituals in favor of the actualization of his own moral responsibility (259). Basic humanity becomes a moral system that the boy carries out in solitude as he returns the clothes of the old thief to the side of the road, fulfilling his father’s prophetic vision of him as a tabernacle, a chalice meant to house not just God but humanity as well.
Even if the son is not aware of the religious lilt his father lends to his responsibility—or is even aware of his own ritualistic carrying of the fire—McCarthy’s image of the boy is certainly religiously-inspired. Broncano points out that the fire metaphor transfigures the boy into a “new Prometheus, with the task of rebuilding man with clay—this time with ashes—and bestowing on him the fire that the gods of old had appropriated” (128, my emphasis), and even compares the father/son relationship with the Father and the Son in Christianity, writing that “the son…has not come to judge the dead, but to lead humankind to a second rebirth, to build a new world on the ashes of the biblical book that has finally been closed forever” (127). Rising from his father’s image of him as a savior, the son assumes control of his life and the “unimaginable world” as he carries the fire and becomes a messenger for the new world, a carrier of essential doctrine that defines what it is to be human and what it is to be moral in a world where there is no law or society. This divine responsibility of the son is alluded to by the father when he looks on the boy and says: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (3). And it is what carries the boy forward on the road, this surety that he has the fire with him, given him by the father who promises that the fire is “inside you. It was always there. I can see it.” (279)
Because of this responsibility, the end of the father is not the end of the son. When the father dies, the son is able to get up and continue onward. He searches for those who are “good guys,” the people who hold the same fire he does and who are dedicated to preserving it. And in seeking to preserve the fire, the son finds a new religiosity as he prays to his father for remembrance and guidance, not forgetting what his father had taught him despite the changing nature of the religious control used by the father and then the son. And “the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time” (286).
III. CONCLUSION
The Road ends where few apocalyptic novels do.
There is no express hope for a renewed future, no plan to set the ecosystem right, no villainous government to defeat, no way for the boy to meet up with his family who have passed on from his world. There is only the road, “maps and mazes…of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again” (287). And yet, within that chaos of things which could not be made right, McCarthy still manages to end his novel with a feeling of hope. That hope is found in the narratives which the father and the son have told themselves, the meaning-making they have performed in their religious narratives of purpose and responsibility. “There is no God and we are his prophets,” declares Ely to the father and the son (170). In response, the father points to his son and asks, “What if I said that he’s a god?” (172). Ultimately, The Road is not about the ending of the world, but about the continuation after the world has ended. Nor is it about the ending of religion or the ending of God, but of its continuation as well. Such a continuation is only possible through the illusory control that its inhabitants make through the stories they tell; the life and order that they construct from chaos. Not all stories need to find that order and control in religion—though apocalyptic stories might take note of the attention McCarthy pays to understanding the roots of the genre, in making it complimentary with the stories that humans have been telling themselves ever since we first started telling stories. However, as we look forward through times where we might collectively feel that the world is ending because of a pandemic or looming war, we should understand the power that narratives of many kinds have to create purpose, responsibility, and direction in our lives.
Stories have that power to bring us through the end of the world.
And to continue after.
Works Cited
Broncano, Manuel. “Grocery Shopping in the Commissary of Hell: The Road.” Apocryphal Borderlands: Religion in Cormac
McCarthy's Fiction, Routledge, New York, NY, 2014, pp. 125–139.
Delistraty, Cody C. “The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 3 Nov. 2014,
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/the-psychological-comforts-of-storytelling/381964/.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage International, 2006.
Metcalf, Robert. “Religion and the ‘Religious’: Cormac McCarthy and John Dewey.” The
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 31, no. 1, 2017, pp. 135–54. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.31.1.0135. Accessed 15 Jun. 2022.
[1] The main characters of The Road have no names, referred to simply as “the man” and “the boy” throughout.
[2] For those unfamiliar with McCarthy’s style, he frequently ignores apostrophes within dialogue.