“There Is No God and We Are His Prophets”: Remembrance and Ritual in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
The Road is bleak but it is also rich with hope
Please read “‘You’ve Heard It All Your Life’: Echoes of the Divine in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy” before reading this post.
Civilizations and ecosystems have collapsed, and humanity is withering away.
A plunge in population has been one part of this lurch toward lifelessness, but a declension of human life is far from the only result of this cataclysm.
Humanity’s desperation to survive has distorted survivors into murderers and cannibals.
To be human is no longer to be humane.
Remembrance and Reality in The Road
In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, God exists only as long as some memory of him persists in the minds and memories of individuals—or at least that’s how it seems throughout much of the novel. In other words, it is only by means of memory that the transcendent is made real. When the “sacred idiom”—the grammar by which we remember all that is beautiful and good—is forgotten, the language of transcendence will have been
shorn of its referents and so of its reality.
At one point, an old man converses with the unnamed protagonist who sacrificially shepherds his son to a place of safety. The old man inquires,
How would you know if you were the last man on earth? …
I guess God would know it. Is that it?
There is no God.
No?
There is no God and we are his prophets. …
Where men cant live gods fare no better. … To be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing.
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