How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke. (3.1)
Although it seems like The Boy might believe in God, it's not all that clear whether The Man does. However, The Man does believe in the sanctity of The Boy. Meaning, he believes that The Boy is holy – maybe the only thing holy left in the world. This provides The Man with purpose: if he can protect The Boy, he's doing something good. It's his "warrant" – in a sense, the sacred activity that authorizes The Man to live.
Quote #2
He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through the trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God. (13.1)
In this passage, it seems like The Man might actually believe in God. If someone starts asking questions about the physical characteristics of God – "Will I see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you?" – it's possible this someone has at least a smidgeon of faith. By getting angry at a possible God, he lets on that he just might believe in God. It's also important to note that if he does really believe in an all-powerful being, The Man is quite angry with him.
Quote #3
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must. (19.1)
We're not sure why The Man has to get up in the night. He's not tending a fire in this passage – maybe to scout out suspicious sounds? Or cough? Anyway, McCarthy's description of total darkness is pretty cool: "a blackness to hurt your ears with listening." And although there's total darkness in the night, The Man doesn't think there's total nothingness. He guesses there might be "[s]omething nameless in the night, lode [rich source of something] or matrix" (i.e., there might be a very anonymous and quiet God out there).
Quote #4
[The Man:] You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand? (120.5)
A little plot background might help here: the Man has just saved The Boy from a very scary-looking dude who probably would have killed him. (It's unclear why this scary-looking dude tries to kidnap The Boy. To get The Man's stuff? So he can get The Man and The Boy back to his truck and eat them?) It is clear, however, that The Man takes parenting – which, in this book, involves protecting kids from bloodcults – very seriously. Seriously enough, in fact, to say it's his God-given mission in life.
Quote #5
[The Man:] How would you know if you were the last man on earth? he said.
[Ely:] I dont guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
[The Man:] Nobody would know it.
[Ely:] It wouldnt make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.
[The Man:] I guess God would know it. Is that it?
[Ely:] There is no God.
[The Man:] No?
[Ely:] There is no God and we are his prophets. (237.23-237.30)
The Boy and The Man meet an old man on the road who at first says his name is Ely but then says that's not really his name. (For simplicity's sake, we're just calling him Ely.) Ely says some mysterious things, especially this last catchy phrase: "There is no God and we are his prophets." What in tarnation does that even mean? It could mean: "God doesn't exist and our suffering is proof that he doesn't exist." It could also mean: "God doesn't exist up above the universe, but he exists in some of us (like The Boy) and so we are his prophets." Or – and this is the more complicated, juicier version – it could just be one of those mystical religious statements that don't make logical sense but ring true to many people. (Here's a familiar one: "Jesus was both divine and human.") Is your head spinning now? Good.
Quote #6
[Ely:] When I saw that boy I thought I had died.
[The Man:] You thought he was an angel?
[Ely:] I didnt know what he was. I never thought to see a child again. I didnt know that would happen.
[The Man:] What if I said that he's a god?
The old man [Ely] shook his head. I'm past all that now. Have been for years. Where men cant live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true. Things will be better when everybody's gone. (237.72-237.76)
Ely can be a real downer. For example, this statement: "It's better to be alone." He also pretty much says the years have worn down his belief in anything exceptional, anything holy. We think "where men cant live gods fare no better" means that men carry their gods within them. When men get broken by suffering, their gods also disappear. It's kind of a novel statement – that our happiness and comfort allow our gods to exist.
Quote #7
He loaded the flarepistol and as soon as it was dark they walked out down the beach away from the fire and he asked the boy if he wanted to shoot it.
[The Boy:] You shoot it, Papa. You know how to do it.
[The Man:] Okay.
He cocked the gun and aimed it out over the bay and pulled the trigger. The flare arced up into the murk with a long whoosh and broke somewhere out over the water in a clouded light and hung there. The hot tendrils of magnesium drifted slowly down the dark and the pale foreshore tide started in the glare and slowly faded. He looked down at the boy's upturned face.
[The Boy]: They couldnt see it very far, could they Papa?
[The Man:] Who?
[The Boy:] Anybody.
[The Man:] No. Not far.
[The Boy:] If you wanted to show where you were.
[The Man:] You mean like to the good guys?
[The Boy:] Yes. Or anybody that you wanted them to know where you were.
[The Man:] Like who?
[The Boy:] I dont know.
[The Man:] Like God?
[The Boy:] Yeah. Maybe somebody like that. (336.1-336.15)
The Man doesn't really believe either "the good guys" or God will actually see the flarepistol. But the way McCarthy describes the flare's explosion over the water – "hot tendrils of magnesium drifted slowly down the dark" – suggests that the gesture is somehow beautiful. To put it another way, we have a hard time believing McCarthy would use such pretty language if he wants us to feel despair. Rather, we think McCarthy wants us to see The Man's irrational hope of finding other "good guys" (or God) as both tragic and beautiful.
Quote #8
The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He'd stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle. (373.1)
Well, things sound pretty dim for most of this passage. The Man and The Boy are losing track of time, and there are corpses everywhere. Plus, there's the ever-present night and cold and muck of the novel. But despite all this horrendous suffering and bleakness, The Man actually sees something beautiful and hopeful in The Boy. It's kind of surprising. To The Man, The Boy is the shrine of some possible good future.
Quote #9
He took the cup and moved away and when he moved the light moved with him. He'd wanted to try and make a tent out of the tarp but the man would not let him. He said that he didnt want anything covering him. He lay watching the boy at the fire. He wanted to be able to see. Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right. (380.1)
The Man is finally dying. McCarthy has hinted for much of the book that he doesn't have long – note the coughing and weak lungs – but The Man doesn't actually die until the last pages. McCarthy walks a fine line in the death scene here. On the one hand, we could say The Man is simply hallucinating and speaking nonsense. He thinks daylight moves with The Boy and says something unintelligible about prophets and forms. On the other hand, there's some wisdom in what The Man sees and says. The Boy is good and so it makes sense that the light would follow him. And doesn't The Boy honor all fathers and prophets by caring for The Man in his last hour?
Quote #10
The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time. (389.1)
In a way, The Boy continues the type of spirituality present in much of the novel. It goes something like this: There might not be a God, but through love we can find divinity in each other. At least that's how we make sense of all the religious imagery surrounding The Boy. From The Man's perspective, The Boy is the one good thing out there, worthy of his love and protection. It's even possible that The Boy carries a new fire within himself – not only goodness, but the memory of his father.