“Many survivors seem to be able to transcend their trauma temporarily and harness their pain in acts of sublimated creation; for example, the writers and Holocaust survivors Jersy Kosinski and Primo Levi seem to have done this, only to succumb to the despair of their memories in the end.” Black Hole of Trauma
This excerpt of the article we read really stuck out to me as really applying to The Road, the man in particular, and how it affected his journey. Obviously the action of the book itself is traumatic, but reading this makes me think about how surviving whatever apocalypse went down really affected the man and everyone else in his version of the world.
The man is able to “transcend his trauma” because the only thing he cares about is his little boy, which I would argue is his “sublimated creation.” In trying to overcome the devastation of losing almost his entire world, he creates a life for his son, makes it possible for his son to carry on with or without him. In teaching his son how to live in this new world, he relives a lot of his old memories and shares them with his son, bringing them to the surface in a way that seemed to eat away at whatever was left of his will to live and overcome.
I definitely think that the man wrapped up his greatest joy (however much of that was left) and his greatest pain in his son, his proverbial ‘creation’, and that is what makes the son so strong in the end. If the man didn’t have the life of his son to be responsible for, it’s possible he never would have had the strength to overcome the trauma he sustained in the first place. Then again, it’s possible Cormac Mccarthy didn’t mean that at all.
I hadn’t thought about the son as a “sublimated creation,” but it’s an idea worth further exploration. To play devil’s advocate, I think it’s also worth looking at creativity in general in the novel. There is none. This lack of creative impulse is best encapsulated by the son throwing away the flute (p. 159). It seems as if there’s no room for creation in this world. Perhaps the father sees glimpses of it (he had carved the flute, after all), but the son will have nothing of it. The man borders the old world and the dying, new world, while the son is squarely in the traumatized dying world.