Schaub and The Road

In his essay "Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthy's The Road," Thomas H. Schaub discusses the importance of spirituality and belief from the inside-- that which drives the characters of the novel. The author alludes to an idea from Kierkegaard's "The Absolute Paradox," in which he states, "the individual is always inside his thought and his reasoning, always attempting to reach by thought that which thought cannot think"(Schaub 153). In stating this, Schaub is emphasizing the concept of the man and the boy's journey being in solitude, in that they are experiencing this test of faith by themselves. For the man and the boy have nothing that keeps them going other than their own will to survive and their belief in a higher power. He is trying to focus on the importance of keeping the spiritual aspect of their journey in their hearts and how this is ultimately what drives the father to fight imminent death for his son, and for the son to agree to move on with another family at the end of the novel.

According to the author, the "father's foundation, from the beginning of the novel, is the son...the father's strategy is to construct meaning from the inside"(158). It is the father's duty to keep the boy alive and to lead him to the coast where there is a chance that the boy will find something greater, find more "good guys" like him, and have the possibility of defeating this gruesome post-apocalyptic world. It is in this desire to "construct meaning from the inside" that the father develops the phrase "carrying the fire" to motivate his son to keep on fighting for survival. It is exactly how Schaub asserts in his essay: "he[the father] tries to pass his values on to his son, in part through the language of "fire" he uses to justify their lives" (160). At the end of the novel, when the father is dying and he tells the son to keep on living and to keep fighting for his life, the boy asks, "Is it real? The fire?" and the father answers, "Yes it is"(McCarthy 278). The boy then questions further, "Where is it? I don't know where it is" to which the father responds, "Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it"(McCarthy 279). This establishment of "carrying the fire" is what allows for the boy to move on past his father's death. The father constructs this concept from his own thoughts and own beliefs, and passes it on to his son so that he too can be faithful in times when life is hard. The boy truly does believe that he is "carrying the fire" because the father instills that value in him during their time together. It is this belief on the inside that drives the boy to no longer want to die along with his father. It is evident that the father's repeated assertion that they are "carrying the fire" "is a strategy rather than a belief, a recourse to religious language and forms in the absence of any foundation for them in the world"(161).

Not only does the phrase "carrying the fire" have meaning in that the father created it so that the boy could believe in something on their journey, but the author of the novel also uses it symbolically to symbolize goodness. The boy embodies this goodness in every aspect of his journey. Often referring to himself and to his father as "the good guys," the boy is ignorant of the dangers and reality of the world that he lives in. It is his ignorance that makes him good however, because he does not falter under the evil and maliciousness of the common will to survive in this world. He wants to help others in all situations: such as the boy and the dog that he sees for only a split second, the old man Ely, and he does not even want to harm the man who attempted at stealing all that the boy and his father had to live on. It is this complete and total goodness that keeps the boy from stopping his journey after his father dies, for he believes that there is goodness in all human beings and that is why he joins the other man and his family. The boy is carrying the fire, furthermore carrying all human capacity to be good, and ultimately his unwavering belief in this fire is what allows for him to continue his journey in this desolate land.

Lucky by Alice Sebold

I have always wanted to read a novel by Alice Sebold because I have heard so much about her award winning novel The Lovely Bones. Because I know so much about her work, I decided to read another type of book by her over my break this winter. I chose to read her memoir, Lucky. I was surprised when I found the novel standing next to The Lovely Bones on my bookshelf. Almost instantly, I read the back cover of the memoir and found out that it was about a certain aspect of her life that changed the way she lived forever. It was a story about how Alice Sebold was brutally raped and beaten in a park near her college campus her freshman year. I was inclined more-so to read this novel over The Lovely Bones because I had never read anything like it before. It interested me, and of course I felt sympathy for Alice in reading what the book was going to be about. I decided that I needed to find out what really happened.

The story starts out with quick insight as to why Alice named the memoir Lucky. Alice writes, "In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky"(Sebold 3). In these first few lines of the novel I was immediately hooked. I knew that I was about to embark on a journey throughout the pain and the hardships of Alice Sebold, and honestly, I was somewhat scared. I myself, and I assume most readers, do not like to experience suffering, and to read this memoir was to get a glimpse at the suffering of one individual. It is hard to write about a memoir without sounding like you are just summarizing, however, I will do my best to establish a small relationship between the reader of this response and the author of this memoir.

One thing that really interested me was Alice's family dynamic. Her mom, a recovering alcoholic, her father, a studious and reserved man, and her older sister, who spent most of her time in her room alone, left Alice feeling lonely and unhappy during her childhood years. Her mom had had issues while Alice was growing up, and she took responsibility of taking care of her when no one else would. When she was younger she witnessed her mother battling the disease of alcoholism, and when she got older, her mom's sobriety resulted in anxiety at all times. Her mother couldn't be all that Alice craved for in her childhood, and a lot of the time she was left hanging. And yet, there was always a relationship between her and her mother that was different than those with her father and her sister. It was almost as if she would do anything to protect her mother. It astounded me that she urged that no one should tell her mother that she had been raped immediately following the incident. She writes, "I told the police not to call my mother: Unaware of my appearance, I believed I could hide the rape from her and from my family. My mother had panic attacks in heavy traffic; I was certain my rape would destroy her"(19). Even in the weakness of having just been raped, Alice shows such strength in trying to protect her mother from the inevitable. Despite the fact that Alice is physically, mentally, and emotionally hurting at this point, she still wants to put her mother before herself. I think that this is the truest type of selflessness.

Alice shows an increasingly large amount of strength throughout her experience in being raped. It is inspiring to read about someone who could move on from such a thing and not be afraid to convict the man who raped her. Throughout this memoir, Alice tells of her journey in trying to find and convict the man who raped her in the park that night. The novel recaps every aspect of every police visit, of every trial, and of every moment where Alice felt undermined by those who questioned her. One of the scenes that really intrigued me was when Alice had to identify her rapist in a lineup at the police station. The way she described the one way mirror was so realistic, and it immediately wiped clean my perception of such an experience. She writes, "The room itself frightened me. I was unable to take my eyes from the one-way mirror. On television shows there was always an expanse of floor on the other side of the one-way mirror, and then a platform with a a door off to the side where the suspects stepped into the room, filed up two or three stairs, and took their places. There was a reassuring distance between the victims and the suspects. But the rooms I'd seen on cop shows were nothing like this one. The mirror took up a whole wall. On the other side of the wall was a space little wider than a man's shoulders, so that when they entered and turned, the front of their bodies would be almost flush against the mirror. I would share the same square foot of floor with the suspects; my rapist would be standing right in front of me"(136). In this description of that room, I as a reader was frightened. I felt as if I was standing right next to Alice, trying to decipher through the blurred faces in the one way mirror. I felt her nervousness and I felt her pain. Alice Sebold had an amazing way of doing that throughout all of her memoir, making it seem like you were standing right with her, wherever she was.

She was lucky, though. She found the man that seemed to ruin her life for a certain period of time, and she won her case. Despite the many perils and hardships that Alice did experience, she won that trial. He was sentenced to 8 1/2-25 years in jail on six of the seven charges that she accused him of. There was no way Alice could forget what had happened to her, but she took pride in the fact that she could put this man in jail. She may have been afraid that night, and for some time after, but she was not afraid to fight for her rights.

At the end of the novel, Alice writes, "I remember agreeing with my mother that I had gone through a death-and-rebirth phenomenon in the span of one year. Rape to trial. Now the land was new and I could make of it anything I wished"(204). I loved reading this because it proved Alice's strength; it proved that she was able to get past such a debilitating experience in her life. I felt like she had succeeded by the end of her memoir. And I felt lucky that I had the experience of reading and learning from Alice's experience of getting raped.