Carry the Fire: 

Mythos and Meaning in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy

Steven M. Bezner

    It seems Cormac McCarthy is just about everywhere these days.  Long after his Western novel turned film All the Pretty Horses failed to become a box office hit, his writing is being engaged in a wider scope today than perhaps even he ever expected.  His most recent novel, The Road, was selected as the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Winner for fiction.  The novel shot to extreme popularity when it was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, as a part of which McCarthy granted Winfrey an extremely rare interview.  About the same time, Joel and Ethan Coen purchased the rights to McCarthy’s previous novel, No Country for Old Men, transforming it into a screenplay.  And just weeks ago, McCarthy sat in the Kodak Theater, outfitted in a tuxedo as the film based on his novel garnered four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay, a screenplay whose dialogue was directly quoted in large portion from the novel’s text.  And now rumor has it that The Road will be made into a film, as well.  

    Few could argue that this seems to be McCarthy’s moment.

    With all of this attention turning toward McCarthy, it seems fitting to ask: what, exactly, is McCarthy up to in his novels, particularly these most recent ones?  What, if anything, does he want the reader to take away from his writing?  While literary theorists might challenge the appropriateness to ask such questions, and recognizing that, at least on some levels, a story is, after all, a story—not a speech, lesson plan, sermon, or philosophy—it seems upon a close reading that both of these most recent novels of McCarthy’s are struggling with a greater question.

    In some ways No Country for Old Men is starkly different than The Road.  No Country is,  in many ways, an allegorical tale of the struggle between good and evil and the effects that struggle has on its participants.  The menacing Anton Chigurh glides through the pages of the novel, taking life after life with a variety of means.  He strangles a deputy with handcuffs; he uses a cattle stun gun in a roadside execution; he carries a silenced shotgun into a Houston office building.  His killings are not necessarily random, but they are guided by the tiniest bits of fate, including a coin toss.  Chigurh is the incarnation of evil in No Country, the result of generations of violence made manifest in this one, terrifying character. 

    And although much of the narrative centers on Llewellyn Moss, Sheriff Ed Bell—not Moss—represents good in this struggle.  Unlike Moss, Bell survives the struggle, at least physically.  But McCarthy casts Bell as a tragic character, anyway, precisely because he refuses to struggle for good.  The inexplicable evil of Chigurh is too much for Bell; the novel concludes with his retirement from law enforcement, wondering how he ever ended up like this.  McCarthy describes Bell’s final day at work:

    It was a cold blustery day when he walked out of the courthouse for the last time.  Some men could put their arms around a crying woman but it never felt natural to him.  He walked down the steps and out the back door and got in his truck and sat there.  He couldnt name the feeling.  It was sadness but it was something else besides.  And the something else besides was what had him sitting there instead of starting the truck.  He’d felt like this before but not in a long time and when he said that, then he knew what it was.  It was defeat.  It was being beaten.  More bitter to him than death.  You need to get over that, he said.  Then he started the truck.

    Giving up on good, refusing to struggle against evil, choosing to walk away and live rather than confronting evil and die—those are the marks of McCarthy’s tragic Sheriff Bell, the most sane character in No Country.  Bell is well aware of the cultural erosion going on around him; he references the changing problems in public schools over the last forty years having gone from gum chewing to violence, stating “that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I’ve got.” And he relates a story he read in the newspaper: 

    Here last week they found this couple out in California they would rent out rooms to old people and then kill em and bury em in the yard and cash their social security checks.  They’d torture em first, I dont know why.  Maybe their television was broke.  Now here’s what the papers had to say about that.  I quote from the papers.  Said: Neighbors were alerted when a man run from the premises wearin only a dogcollar.  You cant make up such a thing as that.  I dare you to even try.

    No, Bell is well aware that, as he puts it, “the world is goin to hell in a handbasket,” but he is unable to come to terms with this rapidly devolving situation.  And so he tragically decides to remove himself from the fray, leaving the reader to wonder who will carry on for good in Bell’s absence.  As McCarthy leads the reader toward this meditation, he offers us a small clue on how the good might carry on.  In the concluding passage from No Country, Sheriff Bell tells of two dreams he had about his father.  The first one he has forgotten:

But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night.  Goin through this pass in the mountains.  It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin.  Never said nothin.  He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it.  About the color of the moon.  And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.  And then I woke up.

    The concluding image McCarthy presents in No Country is that of a father carrying fire out into the dark and cold, preparing a place of light and warmth for his son.  It seems quite intentional, then, that one of the recurring phrases throughout his subsequent novel, The Road, is the act of “carrying the fire.”  Where No Country describes the struggle between good and evil in allegorical, extremely violent language, The Road engages the same basic theme, but with less emphasis upon violence and increased emphasis upon human preservation.  The story centers around two nameless characters—a man and his son—and their journey through a post-apocalyptic landscape, attempting a journey from an unnamed American mountain range south toward the coast.

    The journey and landscape of The Road are both extraordinarily harsh.  Whatever catastrophic event that destroyed most of humanity is left unnamed, leaving a land covered in a thin layer of ash with little food or shelter.  Human contact is exceptionally dangerous, as well.  The man and the boy have skirmishes with other groups on their way to the coast; the lack of food has transformed many tribes into cannibals.  Cities, stores, homes, and hospitals lie ransacked, and the man and the boy push a grocery cart down the asphalt road with all of their possessions, attempting to make it to the coast, where they hope warmer weather and the promise of survival awaits.

    The novel is so bleak, as father and son work their way through the devastated wasteland, that one has to wonder if, and how, McCarthy intends to portray hope.  It’s here, in this context of looking for hope, that “carrying the fire” first appears.  Lying awake beneath an overpass one night, they exchange a brief conversation:

Where are we?  he said.

What is it, Papa?

Nothing.  We’re okay.  Go to sleep.

We’re going to be okay, arent we Papa?

Yes.  We are.

And nothing bad is going to happen to us.

That’s right.

Because we’re carrying the fire.

Yes.  Because we’re carrying the fire.

    Later in the story, after a close escape from a cannibalistic home, where people are imprisoned in the cellar, the boy questions his father again, leading back to the fire:

We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we?

No. Of course not.

Even if we were starving?

We’re starving now.

You said we werent.

I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving.

But we wouldnt.

No. We wouldnt.

No matter what.

No. No matter what.

Because we’re the good guys.

Yes.

And we’re carrying the fire.

And we’re carrying the fire.  Yes.

Okay.

    Walking through the wasteland, the father and son are “the good guys,” the ones “carrying the fire,” trying to avoid “the bad guys,” and carve out some semblance of existence in this harrowing world.  The Road’s narrative is intentionally nerve-wracking.  Each day necessitates the ever-present search for food, for shelter, for safety, and, at night, for warmth.  The nights where the father and son have a fire, safety reigns.  But when the fire dies, or when circumstances make a fire impossible, you can be certain that the father and son will soon be in danger.  With the prevalence of “carrying the fire,” McCarthy is clearly speaking to the reader.  When there is no fire, there is no hope.  The fire must be carried.  

Those who carry the fire—the good guys, as the father and son refer to themselves—face continuous adversity along the way.  But, as the father tells his son when faced with extreme circumstances, “This is what the good guys do.  They keep trying.  They dont give up.”  This attitude of continuing in the face of adversity, particularly a reality as bleak as the one portrayed in The Road cannot help but be contrasted against Sheriff Bell from No Country.  Bell gives up in the struggle to make a place for good in an evil world; at the conclusion of the novel he compares himself with his father, recognizing that while some believe him to be a better man than his father, he knows that he has, by refusing to continue on, let him down.

    While the man and the boy from The Road both consider giving up from time to time, they eventually spur one another on, alternately challenging one another to carry the fire, to persist, and to persevere, despite the odds.  In a sense, The Road subtly argues that it is impossible to carry on in the struggle for good if one is alone and isolated.

That is precisely why, when the father dies from medical complications just six pages before the novel concludes, that the reader is overwhelmed with despair.  The boy is left standing beside his father’s corpse, holding a pistol, wondering what to do next.  He is left alone to carry the fire, to be a good guy, in this world that has attempted to scuttle things like meaning and purpose.  After three days of waiting by his father’s body, the boy finally walks out of the woods and toward the road, where a man meets him.  The man and his family have been following them; he has come to see if the boy wants to join them.  But the boy has questions:

How do I know you’re one of the good guys?

You dont.  You’ll have to take a shot.

Are you carrying the fire?

Am I what?

Carrying the fire.

You’re kind of weirded out, arent you?

No.

Just a little.

Yeah.

That’s okay.

So are you?

What, carrying the fire?

Yes.

Yeah.  We are.

    And so the boy decides that in order to carry the fire, he must join with other people; he must be part of a family, a group, a community.  This is significant.  McCarthy, of course, never clearly defines what the fire exactly is, but in the final conversation between the father and son, he gives us a clue as to his understanding.  As the father and son exchange their final words, the boy expresses a desire to die himself so that he can be with the father:

I want to be with you.

You cant.

Please.

You cant.  You have to carry the fire.

I dont know how to.

Yes you do.

Is it real?  The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I dont know where it is.

Yes you do.  It’s inside you.  It was always there.  I can see it.

    For McCarthy, it seems that the fire to be carried is that of human community and civilization.  While evil descends upon the world, be it in the form of apocalypse, Anton Chigurh, or cannibals, these two most recent novels indicate that good can only flourish in the human community bound together with an eye toward some unnamed accomplishment or civilization.  The fire seems to be this mythic reference to a Prometheus; humanity has the fire, and it must struggle to keep it so.  In some respects, this is uplifting, demonstrating the magnificent potential at the hands of the human race.  Of course, with any absence of an explicitly divine realm in most any of McCarthy’s writings, it would also be equally valid to interpret McCarthy as a hopeful humanist, proposing that meaning is found simply in loving human community.

Nevertheless, McCarthy’s vision of carrying the fire and providing meaning by passing meaning down to the next generation dovetails nicely with many aspects of the Christian narrative.  As theologians as diverse as John Milbank and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have demonstrated, the church is continually engaged in a project of deriving meaning from reality by participating in a project of theological interpretation. The church views the world through the lens of the incarnate, crucified, and risen Jesus Christ, and thus they seek to, as Bonhoeffer puts it, “understand the world better than it understands itself, on the basis of the gospel and in the light of Christ.”  For both Bonhoeffer and Milbank, humanity can only be understood through the person of Jesus; he is the model of what being human actually is.  So while carrying the fire in a strictly humanist setting might revolve around the preservation of civilization, or perhaps even education or culture or customs or relationships, the fire passed in the Christian understanding of humanity moves beyond that.

    Obviously, Christian practice would not argue that civilization, education, culture, customs, or relationships are unimportant; each of those are clearly preserved and encouraged through the practices of the Christian faith.  And the Christian story would embrace the image of carrying the fire forward for the next generation; it may, however, define that fire a bit differently than McCarthy.  Human preservation is central to Christian practice, but its concept of the fire centers on the story of the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ, and its practices of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ways in which they tell that story.  By embodying these practices through missional service to the poor, faithfully proclaiming and obeying the Bible, serving as peacemakers, and rightly gathering as the church, they might allow Christ to exist in the world, through the church, thus providing meaning.  Reading McCarthy’s novels with a Christian lens reminds us that humanity is not an end in itself; it gains meaning not simply by generational survival and preservation, but by centering its existence on the one who gives us the fire in the first place: Jesus Christ.