Strength & Skill

I recently finished a book called "The Road". One of the most prominent themes in "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy as well as in his interview with Oprah Winfrey is this ideal of strength and skills.Like most novels about survival, The Road exalts the resourcefulness of its protagonist. Resourcefulness becomes an enshrined skill, partly because it ensures the survival of loved ones. Resourcefulness also allows the protagonist to connect with a disappearing world. Fixing a stove or shopping cart is not only necessary for his survival – it's also necessary to preserve a few man-made artifacts that might otherwise quickly vanish. That said, resourcefulness can sometimes morph into violence or cunning. (In the post-apocalyptic setting of the novel, extreme violence is always just around the corner.)In one passage, The Man fixes their shopping cart while "[t]he boy sat watching everything" (22.1). McCarthy is a natural teacher, his thoughts on the craft of fiction simple and down-to-earth. Of his decision to eschew quotation marks and semicolons, he says, "You shouldn't block the page up with weird little marks. If you write properly, you shouldn't have to punctuate." At the same time, "You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks to guide people, and write in such a way that it won't be confusing as to who is speaking." On a more inspirational level, he says that anyone with enough determination can manage to avoid day jobs and compromises just as he has. "You're just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it."

Both McCarthy and Oprah clearly enjoy their conversation, showing a kind of opposites-attract chemistry as two people who have excelled at the highest level of very different fields. She catches him blushing as he admits that The Road is a love letter to his son, and chides him for his failure to understand women even after three marriages. As she leads him through topics from life to literature to personal finance, he never seems inclined to dumb down or dress up his answers, but gives carefully considered responses that show real respect for the questioner.

At the same time, the contrast can be striking between Oprah's can-do, The Secret-inflected positivity and McCarthy's drier, more humble philosophy. Early in the interview, she asks him about his passion for writing, the importance of being passionate about your work being a key theme in her message for young people. He answers with a shrug and characteristic shy laugh.
"I don't know. Passion ... it sounds like a pretty fancy word. I like what I do, and I suppose I ... some writers have said in print that they hated writing, it was a chore and a burden, and I certainly don't feel that way about it".