Maps and Legends: Patterns of Go Down, Moses in The Road

abstract:One of the central questions tasking any reader of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road is just what, in the final analysis, is supposed to be our estimation of the father? Is he mostly a moral character, utterly committed to his boy and to providing a foundation for goodness? Is he a competent character, and what we are to make of his travels with his son and their ethical clashes? Is the father right in his pragmatism or is the son right in idealism? Has the father learned the rules of the fallen world sufficiently? Or does he still cling to the past? These questions and others are answered through a thorough examination of the many parallel elements in one of William Faulkner’s greatest accomplishments, his novella “The Bear” and the collection it was published within, Go Down, Moses (1942).