Homelessness in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

Throughout Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the two main characters' shopping cart is both essential equipment and a burden on thier ability to properly manuever and survive. This is established early on in the narrative: "He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to abandon the cart and make a run for it" (5-6). It's accepted truth that their greatest asset is also their greatest liability, and contradiction stands at the heart of the novel: it's true of all the items they accumulate, yes, but it's especially true of the boy, who slows the journey down considerably and yet is the man's only reason for embarking on the journey at all.

These contradictions also remind one of the fact these characters, all of them, are homeless and permanently displaced. Their tattered clothes, their uncertain access to food and shelter, their shopping cart, bring to mind images of the homeless in our own society and the challenges they face as people reduced to the status of "other." It's hardly entirely appropriate to read The Road as primarily a commentary on the issue of homelessness, but it seems clear that that image lingers over the novel — a novel written in a 21st century America, where that image is ubiquitous and embedded within the public consciousness.

Later in the novel, when the Man and the Boy encounter Ely, a curious thing happens: though the Man clears him of any threat, after he learns the old man is blind and can hardly move at that, he chooses to abandon him after a brief conversation where the two demonstrate a total lack of trust — Ely reveals he hasn’t shared his real name, and the Man refuses to even give him a spoon to eat with lest he steal it. Despite the Boy’s pleadings, the Man insists this is the only way; yet, he also insists, they are still of the few, perhaps the only ones, carrying the fire. 

McCarthy doesn’t admonish the Man for this decision, or any of the decisions he makes throughout the novel. There are different rules in a survival situation; for many, like the cannibals the Man and the Boy spend the book tirelessly avoiding, there are no rules at all. In a post-apocalyptic framework, McCarthy seems to be exploring a long trope of American literature: an escape from domesicity, especially a masculine escape from domesticity, to the wilderness where the rules are different, decided upon by the individual. What makes The Road so unique then, in this regard, is the fact it represents a forced escape — Huckleberry Finn certainly experienced a period of homelessness, yet the cultural connotation of that word hardly applied. For the Man and the Boy, hardly any other word suffices.

There is a brief period of pseudo-domesticity here though, when our main characters stumble upon the underground bunker, the one filled with food and essential supplies. The Man and the Boy stay for a few days, gorging themselves on sweets and full breakfasts, almost recreating the life before. The owners of the bunker are not there, they are probably long dead, but here, the Man and the Boy, again at the Boy's insistence, demonstrate a degree of gratitude and kindness toward them that would eventually be refused Ely. "Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff," the Boy says. "We know that you saved it for yourself andd if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we were and we're sorry that you didnt get to eat it and we hope that you're safe in heaven with God" (146).

"Is that okay?" he asks the Man. "Yes. I think that's okay," he replies (146).

It's a rare moment of warmth in an otherwise bleak novel, signified by the return, or at least partial return, to a domestic space, a space that doesn't feel so dangerous and apocalyptic: in other words, to a home. Though the Man knows they can only stay so long, it seems that, for a moment, it's a place where the standard social contract returns.