How do you know if you were the last man on earth? He said.
I don’t guess you would know it. You’d just be it. [pg180]
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the end of the world begins with “A long shear of light and then a series of low percussions.” [p54] The details are vague and could be applicable to a number of post-apocalyptic scenarios, but maybe they are the words of a man who witnessed the after-effects of a super volcanic eruption. In The Road, a Nuclear Winter has descended on an unspecified region of America and everything is left covered in a thick layer of dust, the sunlight cannot penetrate the clouds and everyday is as grey as a cloudy winter’s morning. For the ‘Man’ and ‘Boy’, the greyness is perpetual and even time itself has fled from the world, “The clocks stopped at 1:17.” [pg54] Calendars are no longer kept, the Man doesn’t know how long they’ve been travelling the road and there are no seasons or lasting referents to our concept of modernity. Everything they touch is the same – broken or dead, the world smells of ash or the sour stink of rotting corpses and the food which they eat is tainted and rotting.
In May 2010, UK airspace was closed down because the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted sending a massive plume of ash soaring 5 miles above the country, where it was then trapped by the Jet stream and blown across Europe. For three days, air traffic over Europe came to a standstill and the effects were felt worldwide. A couple of weeks after the dust had settled, Channel 4 aired its documentary, The Volcano That Stopped Britain and the screening came a couple of weeks prior to John Hillcoat’s film version of The Road being released on DVD.
The scenes from The Volcano That Stopped Britain closely resemble Hillcoat’s imagined landscape of a post-apocalyptic America where all plant and animal life are virtually extinct and man ekes out an existence amongst the detritus. The series of ‘low percussions’ the Man reportedly hears in the opening pages of the novel sound very similar to the noises the Channel 4 documentary team capture as they record the pressure waves and volcanic bombs of Eyjafjallajökull – they sound exactly like the low rumble of thunder. Scenes from the documentary also show that the ground surrounding the volcano has been churned into a dark slate coloured, clay like substance, which is volcanic ash mixed together with melt water. Because Eyjafjallajökull erupted underneath an ice cap, a colossal amount of melt water cascaded down towards the sea, something which the documentary describes in Biblical proportions, claiming that at its peak, the melt water flow was equivalent to that of the Amazon.
With such powerful forces of nature at play, it becomes easier to understand how the apocalyptic scenarios presented in The Road may have occurred. Hypothetically, if a super volcano such as Yellowstone in the US were to erupt, power supplies and infrastructure within a short space of time become irreparably disrupted on a national scale. The Yellowstone volcano has a collapsed crater (45 x 30 miles) and it’s predicted that if an eruption were to occur the destruction from lava flow, explosions and ash would spread in a 1,000km/600mile radius. These proportions are God like in their stature and the eruption would be accompanied by tremors – something which threaten and disturb the Man and Boy on a number of occasions in the novel.
The volcanic eruption in Iceland was relatively small in comparison to other eruptions that have occurred in the past. It was the direction of the ash cloud itself which caused so much trouble as it headed over towards Europe. In June 1783 a 16 mile fissure tore along Iceland leaving 130 craters and billions of tonnes of lava erupted into the atmosphere. The ash was the most destructive element along with the gases that were released: sulphur dioxide and hydrogen fluoride. The mortality rate in Europe fell as there were widespread cattle deaths, crop failure, famine and poisoning. There are echoes of this in The Road – the Man and Boy have to protect their airways with cloth rags and there is a sense in the novel that the apocalypse, although sudden in its onset, had time to develop like a poison – one by one towns and cities fell, “By the roadside stood another sign that warned of death, the letters faded with the years.” [pg138]
At times, McCarthy’s novel evokes the mummified figures of Pompeii, victims of one of history’s most infamous volcanic eruptions at Mount Vesuvius, AD 79. The Man and Boy encounter charred bodies along the road, “The mummified dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shrivelled and drawn like latterday bog-folk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth.” [Pg 23.]
In The Road nobody comes to save the Man and Boy from their fate – America has been deserted and there are no The Day After Tomorrow style rescue missions. There are only a handful of references to the world outside America, the most telling being the shipwrecked vessel they find when they finally reach the sea. The Man swims onboard and discovers a brass sextant from London, an instrument used for navigation. When the Man discovers the sextant he realises that it is now useless – as useless as a calendar, because the world he once knew has disappeared like a dream or paradise lost. Does London still exist somewhere, or Tenerife for that matter where the vessel came from? Or are they just names etched on things which will weather and fade away forever.
Page references taken from The Road, Cormac McCarthy, (Picador; 2010; London,Basingstoke,Oxford)
The Channel 4 documentary is still available to watch on 4-OD The Volcano That Stopped Britain First Broadcast: Sunday 02 May 2010 Channel 4. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-volcano-that-stopped-britain/4od#3074647
Your research on the effects of supervolcanic eruptions is quite sound, and it’s a very popular theory as to what might have caused the cataclysm in “The Road.” However, I’m inclined to disagree for several reasons. Let me start off by saying that the book doesn’t necesarily take place in “an unspecified region” of the former United States. If you look closely (and especially if you are familiar with McCarthy’s other works) it’s actually quite simple to get a very good idea of where the story is taking place. True, it’s impossible to infer from the clues supplied in the novel where the man’s home was when the cataclysm took place, but it’s almost clear-cut where the man and boy are when the novel begins: They are in McCarthy’s own boyhood neck of the woods-Kentucky. The mountain ‘gap’ that they cross (“The pass was at 5,000 feet…”) that would be Cumberland Gap, through the Great Smoky Mountains. They come out close to the Tennessee/N.C border. They make their way, going South-SouthEast toward the coast, and the story culminates somewhere along the coast of North or South Carolina. I know this because the man at several points in the story, mentions having been to some of the places they pass through with his own father. He even goes so far as to bring his son to his childhood home. (McCarthy was raised in SE Kentucky) It’s implied that they are not taking the most direct route to the coast, most likely because the man is attempting to instill something of his own past on the boy. He recounts seeing the eagle diving and standing with his own father at the pass many winters ago. This is not accidental. The man wants his son in some small way to share some of the memories that he shared with his own father. As for the cataclysm, the clues are: A bright flash, and then a series of low concussions. It’s true that a supervolcano erupting would cause an initial flash and certainly concussions, but it would also mean that there was a definitive blast site. Whereas a comet (or several comet fragments, or meteor fragments) would have caused several. I think it’s important to note that what keeps the man and the boy alive is pure capitalism. Canned goods. Preserves. In parts of the world where food isn’t mass-produced and stocked, supplies would have most certainly dwindled much faster and it’s likely that there are few, if any, survivors in places where mass-marketed and preservable food wasn’t available. Besides that, the Electro-Magnetic-Pulse of an extraterrestrial object colliding with the earth would have made all machinery obsolete. No car or truck with an ignition system built after the mid seventies would have ever been able to operate again. That means that nothing that wasn’t built to withstand that kind of EMP hit would have remained usable. It’s never discussed whether or not someone might be alive in a fortified military bunker somewhere or aboard a submarine. The man is far too concerned about daily survival to ponder such things, but to the reader, these are extremely interesting points to raise. McCarthy himself is a science buff and associates primarily with scientifically-minded people, not fellow authors. I’m certain that he wrote the book with accurate factual information that would support whatever his supposed cause to the disaster might be. Had the Yellostone volcano complex been the culprit, it’s more than likely that there would be next to no survivors on North America. With the oceans dead, it really doesn’t matter what specific area on earth was originally the most affected. Water resources have been permanently damaged everywhere due to ash and almost certainly, all vegetation has died due to the obstruction of the sun. Again though, thanks for posting, I greatly enjoyed your take on it and it’s wonderful to see that this fantastic piece of writing has inspired someone to scour for every answer to every question the way it has for me. Cheers.
I hated this movie. Love the actor.Wanted to kill the boy myself.
Nobody knows exactly how Yellow Stone might blow, and I think it is the most likely scenario as perhaps described in The Road. I loved the film, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish the book after watching it. I want to plan to finish it when (?) I become a father.
Hey Alex,
You’ll have to remember to read that book when the time comes, it’s definitely worth it. It’s very moving as you might expect, but I read it has a hopeful ending, many people see it differently though. I don’t think it’s a story you will ever forget once you’ve read it. It upset me when I read the last few pages, not many authors can tell fictional tales that move people like that. It’s brilliant.
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Regarding the speculation as to the cause of The Road cataclysm, First off, a nuclear armageddon is out of the question and shouldn’t even be considered, it’s so far off that it shouldn’t even merit an explanation why. Personally I believe it was most likely a Super Volcano eruption or a less likely asteroid/comet strike.
Many of the “clues” are very loose with multiple interpretations available, like for instance “The clocks stopped at 1:17″ this could be referring to an EMP “obviously” OR “and what I think” The Man is using clocks stopped as a metaphor, representing the moment civilization ceased to exists. Next we have the “sheer bright followed by a series of low concussions” If this had been an cosmic body of such a size, and if The Man was close enough to see the light and hear the explosion, then he would have experienced a very powerful heat wave UNLESS he was far enough and protected by the earths curvature, either way, he still would have experienced the shock wave/air blast. So here we have a global killer strike and not a single mention of these things. In the film, windows are seen that remain intact and I am pretty sure that it’s mentioned in the book too. “When they comes across the cannibal group’s mansion” another heavy debunker to this theory is the lack of any warning. It’s pretty unlikely that such an asteroid would have hit earth without anyone seeing it before hand.
Also I believe the reason why a clear answer is kept out of the story, has less to do with “keeping the reader wondering” and more to do with the cataclysm happening suddenly and knocking out power/infrastructure, thus cutting everyone off and without any explanation. Also when the Old Man mentions “signs and everyone thinking it was a hoax” most likely has more to do with our current civilization and the over all dooms day rumors flying around “global warming, ww3, 2012 etc” I don’t think he is referring directly to the event.
I’m not sure that your supervolcano theory is closer to the mark than my meteor theory. First of all, from the numerous clues scattered throughout the novel, it’s simple to infer that the journey undertaken by the man and his son begins somewhere in Kentucky, just west of the Appalachian Mountains. If the Yellowstone volcanoes are responsible for the cataclysm, I would guess that North America would have received the brunt of the destruction. Although there’s no way to prove conclusively that’s not the case, other small clues hint at the epicenter for the disaster being much further away from Kentucky than just across the Rocky Mountains. If the Yellowstone supervolcanoes had erupted, a significant majority of the debris thrown skyward would have almost certainly come to rest over North America. Not to mention that although the man recalls “a series of low concussions” (meaning that there was more than one explosion), I am still leaning more towards a cosmic event rather than a terrestrial one. You claim that we would have ample warning if a foreign object was on a collision course with the Earth. I’m not sure where you heard that, but the top scientific minds on this planet are in total and complete concurrence that we have practically no system in place to detect a disaster like that in advance. And, even if we did have a better system in place, we really don’t have the means to do anything about it. What if we knew a year in advance? Five years even? What could we do about it? The object would smash into the Earth’s surface with strength exceeding that of the simultaneous detonation of every nuclear weapon that has ever existed. It would compress the atmosphere in its path and heat the air around it to a temperature close to that of the surface of the sun. The magnitude of the impact would be great enough to cause every volcano on Earth to erupt. The entire sky would be filled with hundreds of thousands of tons of burning rock and debris. Fires would immediately start wherever the wreckage came to land. Tsunamis and earthquakes of unimaginable proportions would begin to spread across the planet. Seeing the disaster from beyond “the curvature of the Earth” as you put it, would do nothing to quell the speed, the strength or the totality of the destruction. There’s a reason the entire Earth is covered in ash. There’s a reason that not a single plant or animal was able to survive. To put it in perspective, if you were in a very tall building and you watched as the object entered the atmosphere, leaving a trail of burning gas in its wake, then watched as it slammed into the surface of the Earth, you would first be struck by the tremendous strength of the blast, then you would feel the shock reverberating outwards (creating an extraordinarily strong Electro Magnetic Pulse), you would see a huge cloud of dust, ash and rock moving outwards from the blast zone, only it would be eerily silent because it would be moving faster than sound. Clocks would stop. people would hear and feel concussions. And whoever was unfortunate enough to still be alive, he or she would be living in a world remarkably similar to that depicted in “The Road.” Let’s keep in mind that McCarthy tends to roll in scientific circles, not literary circles, and I’m sure he was given the most reliable information available to make his story seem that much more authentic.
Splitting hairs on what cataclysmic event occurred considering the outcome is the same.
Agree completely, if a cataclysm of this magnitude happend it would cut everyone off from information technologies that we have at our disposal today and we wouldn’t be able to fully understand and explain what had happen.. We would be clueless and guessing would be all that we could do.
And in the end it doesn’t really matter why and how it happened. Survival in it most basic form would be all that mattered. We would be back in the dark ages in a blink of an eye with the drawback that we don’t know how to survive like our antecestors did.
I forgot to mention that if the cataclysm was cosmic body impact, along with everything else I said, there also would have been a tremendous amount of ejecta “molten rock” blasted thousand of miles in all directions and into the upper atmosphere/low orbit, eventually falling back down as hundreds of thousands of flaming meteors “even on the other side of the planet” turning the entire planet into an oven.
Hi LMoS,
Really appreciate your perceptive comments – think you’re on the right road with them (excuse the pun) – you’re able to explain it more scientifically than I ever could, it’s really interesting – thanks
Np, Naturally anyone that reads this story is bound to wounder what happened. I thought to mention The Man’s declining heath “coughing up blood” throughout the story, because it lines up to the effects of breathing in Volcanic Ash “the ash consists of microscopic shards of glass” and would obviously cause you to cough up blood “among many other things”. I didnt mention this though because his lung problems could have been from a number of different reasons, so it was just too speculative imo.
Hello, Jean-François from France – sorry for my english – . I was totaly taken over by this movie, of course because of the son/father story, but of course because it opens the way to an incredible number of questions on its social and scientific universe. All those questions of course find their answers in our imagination : how did men try to organize themselves ? Is their an organization of “good” people somewhere ? Are all countries touched by the cataclysm ? Did someone manage to recreate electricity (with wind/water/fuel power?) ? And therefore manage to grow cropses from this light ?
I noticed a few points that maybe someone can answer :
It looks like the situation is grossly 10 years old at the narative point. Do you think a huge volcano could keep a cloud for 10 years everywhere on earth ?
The kid is 10 years old and has been, raised from the cataclysm. If the volcano has produced thick smoke and glass particles in the air, how can a young baby survive ? Mine get sick beacause of Paris pollution
For a kid propper development you have to bring vitamins, milk, vegetables, and probably medecines (child mortality in countries with no access is very high), once again how could have the kid survived that ?
The father and kid find a reserve of food. But a can life is approx 2 to 5 years, hardly 10 ! In reality even canned food would have been unusable at that time. Only wine would have been really excetpional
On the road, some canibals do posess a truck. That means fuel of some kind is still accessible, i guess all the stations nearby have been plundered around since long. Does someone produces oil somwhere, why not then create electrycity form an oil turbine ?
So I think, with all respect to the fantastic discussions on that board- attempt to give a scientific explaination to the movie is tempting but all scientific incoherences of the film make me think this aspect is not important in the story.
Anyway thank you for discussing this movie (see also the thumb discussion).
The novel centers on the man and his son, their journey, their struggle to survive. Wrapped up along with the tale of the epic journey the two take to reach the coast are many, many other themes. There is the theme of childlike innocence versus the cynical adult mindset (this is best represented by the boy’s tendency to believe that there are still “good guys” out there, still people “carrying the fire” like they are). There is the theme of suicide versus survival. (This is best represented by the symbolism of the pistol, on the one hand, it can be used to bring about a quick end if things get too difficult, while it can also be used as a defensive tactic or even as an instrument of murder). There is the theme of humanity versus inhumanity, good versus evil. (This is best represented by the dichotomy between the manner in which the man and the boy conduct themselves and the manner in which the “roadrats” and roving gangs behave). There is also the theme of faith versus abandoning faith, clinging to hope and falling victim to despair. (This is best represented by the man’s constant inner struggle to imprint some kind of faith and system of belief in his son. He curses God for creating the Hellish world they are forced to inhabit, but he recalls the beauty of the world before and feels torn). Interspersed are numerous conflicts such as man versus nature, man versus animalistic man, etc.
To attempt to answer some of the questions you raise, due to the fact that the novel primarily focuses on the man and the boy, the reader is free to speculate on the situation in other parts of the world. We can infer from the limited amount of information that we are given, that things aren’t much different anyplace else. The ship that the man and the boy salvage from on the beach toward the end of the novel had drifted across the Atlantic Ocean from the Cape Verde Islands. The man guessed that it had been drifting aimlessly for some time. The devastation is so complete that the man is incapable of believing that there is life anywhere, and if there is, it probably doesn’t differ all that much from life along the Eastern Seaboard of North America.
It’s interesting to speculate about some of the points you raise. Has anyone been able to preserve any relics from the Earth before the cataclysm? Is there a bunker somewhere stocked with jet planes, helicopters, tanks, weapons, fuel? Maybe. But what difference would that make anyway? Food will run out. Water will run out. Fuel will run out. You can’t hide forever and there’s no hope of procuring enough of anything to rebuild any semblance of an organised society. Especially not when people have been living the way they have been.
Another point that you raise is that it’s been a decade since the disaster. Numerous clues in the novel corroborate that time frame. But here’s the thing: The man mentions more than once that there was some degree of order for a limited time. There were efforts made to assist the many refugees. It wasn’t until the last stores of provisions gave out that total lawlessness and chaos, murder, pillage and rape began to become the norm. Initially, people banded together and survived as best they could. But once it became an every-man-for-himself ordeal, everything went to pot.
Something else you mention is that they probably wouldn’t have been able to scrounge up enough to survive for that amount of time. Personally, I don’t find that to be hard to believe at all. The United States is a land of plenty. If the powers-that-be managed to provide enough sustenance to last the first few difficult years, there would be more than enough to last the survivors for many years to come. Think about the stocks of one single supermarket or the stocks of food in the cupboards of every single home in one small town. Remember that a huge percentage of the population of the world was probably killed initially, then factor in the multitudes that died in the immediate aftermath and you’re left with very few.
You wonder how the boy is able to avoid succumbing to disease when there are no fresh foods available and vitamins are scarce. If the boy received the bare minimum of what was required in the first few years of his life, he would face the same risks inherent in raising a child in the horrors of a third world, war-torn country. They supplement their diet with a lot of canned and dried foods. A lot of home caned (food sealed in jars and such) I’m sure there would be minimal nutritional value there.
As far as the shelf life of some of those foods goes, I’d guess that they’d turn to poison because of the metal after some time, but hopefully, humanity, whoever happens to be left will have found another way by then.
Cheers.
Believe it or not but some degree’s of starvation have been shown to be greatly beneficial to ones life span, In lab experiments, rats that were starved, lived twice as long as those that were well fed. It’s important to remember things like this when considering starvation, There are MANY different degrees of starvation, which all pose different problems. it isnt as though theres just “starving and not starving”
my impressions is that they were some here in the southern United States, could they see the “long sheer of light” all the way in yellowstone and wouldn’t they be prepared wouldn’t the goverment activated the emergency broadcast system in the flashbacks
Quick note if anyone is still monitoring this discussion. First off, I agree with Umberto in the main. There is just too much going on for this to be a supervolcano, even the biggest would not be that effective at extinction. Also, there are continuing earthquakes that McCarthy describes, as well as an event that is indescribeable, as it had no corollaries. Also, agree with the poster who said this wasn’t nuclear war. It’s virtually hubris to think that we could wipe out all life on this planet.
All that being said, the novel was incredibly depressing and I have to question why no one is talking about the danger to humanity that bolide impacts and geological events pose. We need to get off this rock. There are options, they are difficult and expensive, but probably not as expensive as the last Gulf War or the bank bailouts. I know it sounds hysterical to say this, but it really and truly is the most important subject that only crazy people talk about.
I’m not necessarily discounting the theory that a supervolcano could have been responsible for the cataclysm, I’m just saying that the extent of the devastation is far more in line with a cosmic collision. Let’s keep in mind that the man and the boy are traveling south/southeast, their journey most likely beginning somewhere around the Ohio Valley of northern Kentucky and taking them across the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee/North Carolina and then on across the Piedmont region of South Carolina. I gathered that from clues that the author left for us in the novel such as signs for Rock City, the derelict hydroelectric dam, the mountain pass in the gap at 5,000 feet, and the gradual changes in landscape that they encounter as they make their way to the coast. if it had been a supervolcano eruption that caused the cataclysm, it’s most likely that North America would have been hit harder (had it been the Yellowstone complex of supervolcanoes) than other places on the Earth. Sure, it could have been someplace in the Ring Of Fire that was the epicenter of the eruption, but that doesn’t really fall in line with what the man recounts having seen. “A long flash of light and then a dim rose glow, a series of low concussions…” to paraphrase. That, to me, symbolizes a meteor impact, the flash being the object tearing across the atmosphere and then the concussions coming from the impact and the delayed speed of the sound reaching human ears. The object would have heated the oxygen in the air in its path to a ridiculous temperature, something like 60,000 degrees Fahrenheit, turning anything before it to ash, like throwing cellophane into a fire. That would explain the charred remains of buildings and cars, corpses, etc. The object would then have thrown several square miles and hundreds of thousands of tons of dust, ash and rock into the air, and the burning debris raining down on the Earth would most definitely have sparked more fires, even a great distance away from the blast zone. Great clouds of dust and ash would have remained in the sky for weeks or months afterwards, effectively blocking out the sun and causing planet-wide devastation to all forms of vegetation, which, in turn, would have killed off all the animals that depend on those plants for food, and of course, the animals that depend on those animals for food. The object would certainly have passed over a section of the ocean and evaporated vast quantities of seawater, thereby throwing off the balance of the ocean’s salinity levels, killing many forms of ocean life from algae and plankton on up to more complex forms of marine life. This would also help to explain why the weather has become so different in the post-cataclysmic world. With the loss of cyclical ocean currents due to the change in seawater composition, weather would become unpredictable worldwide. it’s even possible that the object hit with such force as to throw the Earth off its axis and set the seasons themselves awry. That would also explain the constant and sporadic earthquakes that plague the post-cataclysmic world. So it seems most likely that the cause was more than just an eruption. Just my two cents.
Great theory. Makes most sense yet. i thought Meteor or Volcano as well.
This sounds very convincing. Because I’m not a scientist/geologist etc I’d not thought that the earth could have been knocked off its axis, thereby causing earthquakes. It does make sense, the world would effectively be pulling itself apart if its equilibrium had been disturbed that much?
This story was amazing! I love that what caused the landscape is left to the reader’s imagination, but I do find myself leaning more towards a volcanic event of some kind. Yellowstone is a popular culprit, but there are certainly other super volcanos that could spontaneously blow their stack at any moment and cause the same effect. Krakatoa, Vesuvius, Toba, just to name a few, and of course the Siberian Traps. If something along that scale erupted again, it would be millions of years before Earth would be anywhere near what it once was with human civilization thriving. Of course, all you’re thinking about while watching the film is what happened, but with the persistent rumbling of the ground, spontaneous fires lighting up for no apparent reason, so much loss of life, and of course many cities abandoned more so than destroyed as depicted in the film, all of this leans more toward a natural, earth-based event, and non-nuclear. Radiation would have killed humans off long before the events of The Road. A comet or asteroid strike could be plausible, but to some degree there might be some notice ahead of time, which the film seems to steer away from. I mean, the man wakes up one night to fire outside unexpectedly. Course, you could have the issue that a comet hit a super volcano. Talk about a double whamy! And it could even be multiple eruptions at once, suggesting that somehow the Earth itself has begun to destablize at it’s core. That might explain even more so why “rumblings” continue to happen even a decade after the event, if the Earth itself is coming unglued. Suffice it to say, you really don’t want to know what happened and you pray you never experience it. But, if you ever did have to experience it, The Road makes you realize that you still want to be one of “the good guys.”
I don’t think that the sporadic earthquakes described in the novel necessarily point to a supervolcanic eruption as the cause of the cataclysm.
Reread the part of the book where the man describes ‘the last night of the world’, he says that: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.”
Would a volcanic eruption (or even multiple volcanic eruptions) really cause “a long shear of light”?
That sounds more like something racing across the night sky. Imagine if you were to climb out of bed at 1:17 to see a comet or meteor hurtling toward the Earth.
The object would immediately begin to burn up upon entering the atmosphere and as it began to slow down, it would compress the air in its path to a temperature equivalent to that of our sun. It would incinerate anything and everything before it.
As the object passed over the sea it would undoubtedly cause millions of gallons of seawater to turn to steam thereby throwing off the salinity levels of the world’s oceans and causing catastrophic worldwide climate fluxuation.
The object would then slam into the surface of the Earth with a force stronger than that of the simultaneous detonation of each and every nuclear weapon that has ever been created.
The blast would immediately turn hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of tons of rock into dust and ash that would start fires far away from the blast zone when they returned to Earth.
If the object was to strike with enough force, it’s even possible that the impact could cause some or all of the Earth’s volcanoes to erupt at once, sending hundreds of tons more of burning rock and ash into the atmosphere. It’s not impossible that the Earth could even sustain a hit so powerful as to be knocked off its own axis, thereby causing planet-wide tidal waves and upsetting weather patterns everywhere.
It’s true that the Earth hasn’t seen a supervolcano eruption in recorded history, so we really don’t know what the extent of the devastation might actually be, but we haven’t had a meteor impact in human history either, so we can’t say how they would differ.
It’s been speculated upon that the cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs was a meteor impact and that the object slammed into the Earth somewhere near the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. We don’t know how long it took for most of the species to die and obviously there were enough left for life itself to maintain a toehold on the planet. In the devastated world depicted in “The Road” it seems as though human beings (although greatly diminished in numbers) are the only living things to have managed to survive.
I’ve also read that scientists speculate that in ancient times, there was an eruption on the North Island of New Zealand (which at that time was uninhabited by humans) that was recorded by many ancient peoples that had no connection to one another. Supposedly, this eruption dwarfed that of Krakatoa and there were still many species left alive centuries later when the first Polynesian explorers to set foot on New Zealand arrived. (The volcano itself was completely obliterated by the force of the eruption and scientists have only pieced together evidence of its existence by studying its footprint in present-day Lake Taupo North Island New Zealand)
Anyway, just a little food for thought that maybe it would take a bit more than just a volcanic eruption (even if we are talking about the most massive eruption we can imagine) to really obliterate all life on Earth. From what I’ve read it seems like the most likely, the most devastating cause of a cataclysm like that (one that had the strength to wipe out 99.9% of the species alive on the planet) could have only come from the heavens.
Whilst I admire the clear conviction and strength with which you argue your point, I really think you are missing the mark somewhat. In an interview I read with CMC himself, he clearly states that he ‘doesn’t know’ what caused the ‘end of the world’ in The Road. He says that some of his friends at The Institute- that’s all those scientific circles people were going on about- thought it sounded like an asteroid but that it “could be anything”, before mentioning nuclear war and speaking at length about Yellowstone. It’s true that he did conduct research into what different types of cataclysms would look like- he says as much- but I think it’s clear he chose to scatter clues and paint a scene in such a way as to make several explanations plausible.
Which I believe leads to the main point: CMC is an incredibly accomplished author, and he doesn’t waste a single word. The ambiguity surrounding whatever happened to the world is deliberate. It reflects the fact The Man himself has absolutely no idea what caused the world to be how it is. It happened too quickly, with too much infrastructure and all communications cut off before any explanation could be found or transmitted. The fact the cataclysm is a mystery even to The Man completes the utter awfulness of the situation, robbing readers and characters alike of the ability to make any sense of what has happened or transpose any sense of order onto the chaos of the ashes.
It’s important to bear in mind, therefore, that really, the setting of the road is a construct. It’s an entirely contrived situation. Nobody can say with any certainty that any disaster or combination of disasters could reduce the world to what it is in The Road. McCarthy needed to paint a picture of a world so bleak and hopeless in order to craft within it the story he wanted to tell, which is a story about love, fatherhood, the meaning of humanity, the dichotomy between good and evil, etc.
I also believe there are many environmentalist overtones throughout which, to my Greenie eyes anyway, hint the cataclysm was in some way human-caused- the final paragraph, about the trout, is particularly resonant.
As a final note, the asteroid which supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs was some 25km across, yet every living thing on the extraordinarily diverse earth we live in today evolved from plants or animals that survived that impact. So I’d say it would take a lot more than merely an asteroid to wipe out all life on the planet
I’m aware that McCarthy himself has said that he’s unsure of what caused the cataclysm. But this thread exists so those of us who enjoyed the novel can speculate about all of the possibilities and share our theories. I’ve read nearly every one of McCarthy’s books so I’m familiar with the fact that he very often leaves the reader with a lot of unanswered questions. But I think it’s only natural for people to want to solve mysteries. I’ve talked to many people over the years that have been wondering about unanswered questions in McCarthy’s works – one in particular that comes up a lot is the mystery at the end of “Blood Meridian” – what exactly causes the man to gasp? What horror does he see?
Having read “The Road” many times, (I have been reading the book with my students for about four years now) I don’t know if I agree with you about the man not knowing what caused the cataclysm. As you mentioned, McCarthy always makes every word count, and when he recounts the night of the event, I don’t get the impression that the man is at a loss as to what’s happening. The man’s wife actually asks him about what is happening and he doesn’t reply. But he checks to see if the power is on and thinks to fill the tub straight away. Again, we can’t know why the man doesn’t answer his wife’s question. It very well could have been because he didn’t know. Or it may have been because he didn’t want to tell her. We can’t know, but it’s interesting to ponder things like that. Later on in the novel, after the man and his son had seen the horror in the woods, the boy asked where the baby had come from and the man doesn’t answer. Obviously, it’s not because he doesn’t know. Just an example.
It’s interesting to me that you feel there were quite a few environmentalist themes in the novel. That’s something that I have only heard mentioned by a few people. I would say that the Biblical themes are very strong as well. As this thread is geared solely on talking about the possible causes of the cataclysm and not the book itself, I haven’t gone into detail about any of that here. It’s a well known fact that McCarthy’s circle of friends doesn’t include a lot of authors but consists mostly of people involved with science in some way. It would be more than likely that their expertise played some role in McCarthy’s formation of the bleakness of the world in the aftermath of the cataclysm.
Regarding your final thought on the asteroid, I could have sworn that I’d touched on the fact that life managed to find a way, that explains why we’re here. It’s impossible for us to say whether or not an asteroid or comet far larger than anything that’s come our way before could destroy all life on this planet.
I would like to thank you for your very well thought out reply. It’s nice to talk with others who enjoy this book as much as I do and I appreciate all of your feedback. if you find some free time, I’d be interested to read more about your opinion that environmental themes can be found throughout the novel.
Take care.
“And if he is not the word of God; Then God never spoke.”
Somebody please read the book Life as we Know It
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
It’s set in the future about 50 years from now I believe so maybe it was a new fusion power plant that exploded and turned the world into one big Chernobyl (loosely speaking) obviously fusion and fission are different but yeh it could be humanity’s first attempt to dabble with fusion power goes horribly wrong and bye bye civilisation. I will take ur silence as your agreement with me .
I think that McCarthy intentionally made it very difficult to gauge the exact timeframe for “The Road.” Obviously, all that’s left of the “Old World” is whatever hasn’t rusted or rotted since the cataclysm occurred, but if you read closely, there are small clues that hint that the cataclysm may actually be an alternate history rather than a tale about the modern world being destroyed.
It’s my hypothesis that the novel begins close to McCarthy’s boyhood home in western Tennessee. The man and his son then begin to travel east, crossing the Appalachian Mountains into Tennessee and then head south before finally reaching the coast of South Carolina. I gleaned this information from the fact that many of McCarthy’s novels are partly set in the area where he grew up and he refers to the area the man and his son travel through as they make their way toward the coast as “The Piedmont” which is a common term for the flatlands along the Carolina coastline.
But since McCarthy’s boyhood, many tunnels have been blasted through the mountains and hills of Kentucky and Tennessee and never once does he mention the pair traveling through a tunnel. Yes, I’m sure the man would be far too cautious to risk walking through a tunnel, but it could also save them a lot of walking so it’s hard to say. Another clue us that the house where they find the bunker buried in the yard has cardboard cans of motor oil in the shed. It’s been quite a while since any motor oil has been sold in anything besides a plastic bottle. Still another clue is the truck the roadrats were driving through the mountains. if the cataclysm was caused by a comet or meteor strike like I believe it was, then the Electro Magnetic Pulse of the explosion as the object collided with the Earth would have knocked out any vehicle with an electric ignition and that vehicle could never be started again. But vehicles made prior to the mid-1970s still had fuel-injection engines and EMP wouldn’t prevent them from starting.
My guess is that the novel takes place somewhere between 1970 and 1985. But that’s just my own theory.