The topic for this post stems from our family's most recent homeschooling unit dealing with civil rights and African-American history. Besides reading about Martin Luther King, the horrifying period after Reconstruction, and seeing a great musical on the 1961 Freedom Riders, we read the novel Sounder by William Armstrong. When I was in second grade, our teacher, Mr. Leichty, read the book to us and I was very taken by it, imagining what it would be like to be the boy in the story. Encountering it again, I was drawn to the character of the father, most likely because I am now a father myself, showing how time and life changes alter our perceptions of stories. Sounder also resonated with a book I read not too long ago: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which also tells the tale of a relationship between a father and son during desperate times. In this post I'm going to compare the two stories and their remarkable similarities, especially looking at what they have to tell us about the complex ways fathers and sons perceive one another. (There will be times, necessarily, when I give away parts of each book, so keep that in mind. Obviously, if you've read both books, this post will mean more to you, but if you haven't, maybe by the end you'll want to.) Also, if you stay with me to the end, there is a bonus Haiku!
Sounder (1969) focuses on an African-American sharecropping family. Amid the poverty and racial oppression they face, the oldest boy and his father find joy in hunting with their hound named "Sounder" due to his booming bark. (Interestingly, the dog Sounder is the only named character in the entire book.) During a particularly bleak winter, as the family goes hungry day after day, the father goes out in the night to steal food so that they can eat. Not long after, the white sheriff and his deputies arrive to arrest the father in a disturbing scene that involves Sounder being badly wounded with a shotgun blast. Convinced the dog could still be alive, the boy searches for Sounder, who eventually returns, though mutilated and mute. The boy then undertakes long journeys looking for his father at various prison labor camps, encountering abuse and violence from whites along the way. Though he never finds his father, he does meet a teacher who offers to tutor him in reading and writing. Eventually, the father returns home, crippled by his years of hard labor in prison. He, and Sounder, die shortly thereafter and the boy moves on to continue his education.
The Road (2006) is not for the faint of heart. It is as stark and bleak as the cover above suggests. The same is true for the 2009 film adaptation starring Viggo Mortensen.
The Road describes a shattered, post-apocalyptic world of ash and cinders. An unnamed father and son travel through this devastated, desolate landscape, making their way to an undefined destination, with only each other for comfort. McCarthy reflects the spareness of the landscape in the text itself by eliding apostrophes, commas, quotation marks, and even capital letters. The words themselves have been rendered barren, just like the earth. As the man and boy travel, they face starvation and must be constantly vigilant against roving bands of ruthless cannibals. Though they speak of being "the good guys" and want to keep a spark of humanity ("the fire") burning, the father's uncompromising protection of his son often veers into unwarranted suspicion and even cruelty toward strangers. The boy picks up on this and fears they may be turning into "the bad guys." Sickness and a wound from a hostile band eventually lead to the father's death, but the boy is able to find a family of people he can trust and with whom he can carry on.
Both books share the device of not naming their characters. At one point, select critics found fault with Sounder for this move. Framing the characters in this way, though, lends both texts a kind of universality: they are not about particular people, they are about tensions, pains, and issues anyone can face. These books also refuse to provide firm places or dates, rendering the location of the narrative both nowhere and everywhere (though in fairness, given its firmer historical context, we could probably loosely locate Sounder). These choices on the part of the authors help to pull the reader in and see beyond particularities to the broader resonance of human experience.
Both books also delve into religious imagery. Sounder offers explicit instances where the boy and his mother refer to David and Goliath or Joseph in Egypt as touchstones for their current situations. I think it's significant that the Biblical references are entirely to the Old Testament, with that corpus' themes of escaping slavery, dealing with a wrathful (and usually inscrutable) God, and the pining for justice. The Road offers far less evident notions of religious imagery, but when more diffuse concepts arise, they are quite powerful. For instance, as the father looks at his sleeping son, he thinks, "If he is not the word of God God never spoke." This simple line potently communicates the father's fierce devotion, as well as the burden he feels. There are possible references to Job and Revelations in the book, and some have argued that the boy symbolizes a kind of Christ-child. I find this kind of interpretation much less convincing than the tack that the book wrestles with base human conflicts about what it means to be a good, moral person, and all the potential religious questions such a tension abuts.
Most poignant for me, however, is the register both stories hit regarding the journeys fathers take with their sons. (One certainly could read either text for the even more universal theme of parenthood, but as a father with sons, that is the level at which I was struck.) Both fathers struggle, but are ultimately unable, to protect their sons from a thoroughly hostile world. Both fathers are pushed over the moral line (one by stealing, the other by lying) in the effort to provide for their boys. The father in The Road is especially flawed, consistently acting in ways that bend or break the very morality he is trying to instill in his boy. Yet, what sets him apart from the surroundings is that he is at least attempting to provide a good example whereas the rest of world has given up. Finally, both fathers die when their sons are fairly young, yet, in acts of authorial mercy, Armstrong and McCarthy end their stories with each boy finding paths to seemingly brighter future, whether (respectively) through education or a surrogate family.
When my wife and I first became parents, I keenly felt the descent of heavy responsibility onto my shoulders and perceived, more than ever before, that the world around me did not correspond to the world I wanted for them. The books encapsulate what I fear and hope for my own sons. I fear how I will never be able to fully protect them, that hurts and trials unknown and unfair await them. I hope, even as it pains me, that like the boys in both stories, they will be able to move beyond my need to protect them. In Sounder, we can see that the boy has moved on when, after his father dies, he realizes Sounder will soon follow, but is willing to still leave to attend school, even though the dog is still living. He has let that part of his life go in order to create his future. In The Road, the boy could stay hidden where his dying father secluded them, but instead he ventures out and discovers another (friendly) family. I could not help but read the dire straits of both books as the fears we fathers have for our sons of what they will encounter when we're gone, but the endings gave me hope enough to trust that, though our boys must journey on ultimately without us, they will find their way. The last words of the father in The Road evoke a courageous faith in life that I am not certain I share, but to which I aspire: "Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again." In Sounder, the first book the boy finds is from Montaigne and at the end of the story, after his father's death, he recalls this famous quote: "Only the unwise think that what has changed is dead." It is a sign that the boy will carry forward his father's influence, remembering the man when he was in his prime. Those images, I suppose, live on in our children's minds, just as images of them as our little ones live on in ours.
Bonus Haiku
While shoveling snow the other day, I thought up a haiku:
White flakes fall gently
on the earth. The call of a
hawk breaks the still air.
That's all for now. Until the next time, take care.
No comments:
Post a Comment