The Road, Reading Blog #11 - The Watchers' Council

Entire pages of The Road are devoted to lessons of morality, and the distinction between "good guys" and "bad guys" as the father and the son attempt to maintain some semblance of normal, moral rules. Truly, though, this is of little benefit to them, as there is no one else to appreciate it. This is addressed in the story in its characteristically defeatist way, as rhetorical questions are posed to the father, and to some extent, to the reader. The narrator asks right out, "do you think your fathers are watching?  That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground" (196). Still, though, they continue to strive for goodness, imagining the promise -- or threat -- of watchers. When they shoot an old flare gun, the boy is disappointed with its range, admitting that he wants to show where he is to someone -- the good guys, or god, or "somebody like that" (246). Later, the boy meets other good guys, who do indeed watch him -- but the father never even knows they're there.

So, for their entire journey along the road, they have no physical proof of anyone watching or judging them; still, they have an obvious, if ambiguous, moral authority. This, more than anything else in the story, is commentary of a fundamental part of people. It is testament to the need we all feel -- not only as religious groups, or countries, or communities, but as individual human beings -- to follow a moral code. And while it might be more interesting to analyze the philosophies of the wandering cannibals, the book is about the man and the boy, and so I will focus on the man and the boy. Their stubborn adherence to their notion of goodness, despite the destruction surrounding them, is evidence that their way of life, that humanity itself, is not yet eradicated. Their fathers may be dead in the ground, but their morality is not. These ideals motivates the father to resist murder, and violence, when he can. It motivates him to abstain from eating a dog, and other people, when without other food. Most importantly, it motivates him to impart his ideals to his son, and to listen to his son when his son's morals are stronger than his own. If he were weighed in some metaphysical ledgerbook, he would not be found lacking, not at all. If he had a task, it was to continue humanity, and he has, for all intents and purposes, succeeded. His watchers would be proud. Who watches you, reader?