While the man and the boy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road certainly experience traumatic events, I feel like they do not succumb to trauma itself. They experience intense emotions such as sadness, fear, and even terror but they do not let these emotions and traumatic events cloud their judgement. Instead of succumbing to post traumatic stress, the man and the boy remain strong and continue on their journey to the coast. For example, during their travels, they come across a house where humans are harvested for food by cannibals. In the basement of the house, they discover gruesomely injured people, specifically a bleeding man without legs. They are nearly captured by the cannibals during this scene in the novel. However, once they reach safety they continue with their journey. In the article The Black Hole of Trauma, the author writes that people who overcome trauma do so by becoming preoccupied with the horrific event.
“Having involuntary intrusive memories is a normal way of responding to dreadful experiences. This repeated replaying of upsetting memories serves the function of modifying the emotions associated with the trauma, and in most cases creates a tolerance for the content of the memories” (5).
On the other hand, people who succumb to post traumatic stress are those who fail or are unable to integrate the traumatic experience. I feel that the man and they boy in the McCarthy’s novel do not fit into either category because while they retain their humaity in spite of their horrible experiences, they become desensitized to these events. They learn to live with these memories and experiences. They do not become preoccupied with the traumatic events and they do not appear to have “involuntary intrusive memories” of the traumatic events. They are not portrayed as traumatized victims but rather they are portrayed as strong individuals. This is especially seen in the boy at the end of the novel. Throughout the book, the boy was terrified of strangers because of their past experiences with the cannibals. However, once his father dies and he comes upon strangers, he shows no fear. McCarthy writes that “Someone was coming. He started to turn and go back into the woods but he didnt. He just stood in the road and waited, the pistol in his hand” (281). In conclusion, it seems that the characters in The Road are not traumatized by their past memories and experiences because they remain strong and continue on their journey.
I agree that many of the more telling signs of posttraumatic stress are absent in the case of the boy and the man in The Road, but I still think that they, mostly the man, undergo bouts of stress that greatly impact them. The flashbacks that the man experiences throughout the novel, for example, are signs of … Although the disaster itself is traumatizing and forever looming over the characters, the abandonment of the man and his son by his wife may have served as a bruising moment in the man’s life. His wife leaves him alone with a small child to raise in a setting that on its own would become overwhelming. One may argue that although the overarching effect of the disaster greatly impact the survivors, thoughts of abandonment by his wife in an unusual setting with the burden of a child produce the most trauma and stress in his life.
The way in which the flashbacks, especially those pertaining to his wife, appear in the novel seems to echo the interpretation of intrusions in “The Black Hole of Trauma.” As the authors note, the memories of posttraumatic stress “are often not coherent stories. . . [which] can take the place of flashbacks. . . Because of this timeless and unitegrated nature of traumatic memories, victims remain embedded in the trauma as a contemporary experience, instead of being able to accept it as something belonging to the past” (9). Although the man wishes to relieve himself of these memories and dreams of the past, he is unable to because of their connection to events of his past and, therefore, must carry the baggage of the past as he makes his way to the coast.
The boy also presents signs of trauma, though not to the extent that we might normally expect. His encounter with the cannibals and their harvesting of humans within the confines of the plantation house seems to exacerbate preexisting notions of the “Bad Guys.” This particular event “confirms some of the belief that [the boy] tried to evade . . . rather than presenting [him] with a novel incongruity” (“The Black Hole of Trauma 8). He dreads encounters with the Bad Guys and anticipates some of their escapades, so when he witnesses the extent of their evils for himself he readily clings to the image and carries along with him for the remainder of the novel. Anything that reminds him of cannibalism seems to induce stress in him; the idea of having to reduce to cannibalism terrifies him, and his encounter with the family at the end of the story makes him uneasy and fearful of the possibility that they might be cannibals as well.