My second post

Joey D:

At long last, I have found a moment to comment further on the novel. Andy, I shared your tears after writing the above comment and after then talking to my colleague about the book. It is a great book and I will recommend it again and again, I know.
The happy ending, about which I was unsure, is necessary to the book and therefore part of its greatness. I generally appreciate tragedies more, as you know, but this book had to come through just as we all must come through Lear or Heart of Drakness, etc., and it does not weaken or strangle us in our own task for doing so (not unlike Shakespeare's endings). Why is this so? After all, it's hardly a "happy" ending--the father dies without seeing his greatest, his only hope realized (and it is his story, after all)--and even the small family that adopts the boy is hardly sufficient counterbalance to the horror and ghastly reality they will all continue to inhabit. I would have to look back through the book to see if the ending is less contrived than it at first seemed, but perhaps you could help me there, Andy: are there hints or foreshadows that might keep the shotgun guy at the end from breaking continuity? In any case, it is the father's end that matters most, and it is as profound an ending as any literature can offer. This is why the son's ending, however necessary, does not sully or mitigate the novel's power to move.
What of it's literary merits, by which I mean its symbolic power--its resonance. The books breaks the whole world down to its most basic elements, and nothing is allowed to interfere on confuse: father and son (perhaps, mother and son or father and daughter would be more basic, in another, less literary sense) on a road through oblivion. Here, the father, never named, is all parenthood, the son, also never named, is all hope. Son and father together are thus the full breadth of humanity--experience, with memories as substantial as dreams, and innocence, wondrous even in inordinate darkness, and with a core of kindness (perhaps the son's empathy and kindness is extraordinary--I don't believe that, but the hope for a son's empathy and kindness is not all that rare). The road becomes Life and oblivion is the ultimate perspective or the last meaning.
Now, of course, the book isn't allegory and its relationship to the reader can and should be less "literary," but the potential is there. Perhaps the most awful of all the scenes is one that is only implied: the woman who gives birth to the child only to put it immediately on a spit to save herself and her two companion from starvation. We don't need to understand that symbolically. We can feel it, ourselves, inside and throughout, whether as parents or children.
The trope of God is interesting to follow. You have the boy's prayer (tied to gratefulness) before the bomb shelter meal. Then, you have Ely's "God goes as man goes" and "I would hate to have to witness the death of the last god" (something like that, anyway). And finally, you have the boy's adoptive mother who tell him that "God is the breath between men" (again, something like that--I don't have the book with me). The danger with God in literature is that it minimizes the tragedy and thus also the profundity of man. As Kaufmann says, reflecting on Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, there can be no Christian tragedy--which is to say, there is no tragedy in the reception into a second life, even if it weren't as perfect as Christians imagine it could be. Tragedy necessitates that all the meaning of the world is for this world only, contained within the life that shapes it. Value beyond it reduces its meaning or profundity, which is why Nietzsche often referred to the Judeo-Christian theologians as nihilists. But here--let's get back to McCarthy--in The Road, God is contained in the world and as vulnerable as it--God is community and the hope it espouses--God is humanity (what distinguishes the "good" guys from the "bad"--the cannibals). "The Fire" that the boy represents is God's task, assigned to each and all. There's nothing otherworldly or phantasmagoric in this concept, and that is why it works--why it's reconcilable with the father's tragedy.