Meaning and reality; McCarthy's The Road vs. FD's TBK.

[SFG75]

which conception of meaning as hinted at by McCarthy and Dostoyevsky is most accurate in your estimation? 

FD's is one that espouses orthodox Christian belief, or at least, hints at it, lest people fall into atheism, skepticism, and outright debauchery of the kind of that Fyodor Karamazov epitomized.  With The Road, we get the father who continues to live on, seemingly when there is no hope.  The message of "how does the never to be compare with what never was" would haunt FD and remind him of nihilism and senselessness which he did not write fondly of.  McCarthy's work reminds me of a hardened pragmatism, or will to power light.  That is perhaps a rough statement, but it is the only comparison that comes to mind to me right now. 

[Slovenly Old Man]

   The similarity that I see between The Road, and many of Dostoevsky's works, is the characters’ confrontation with death, as something thrust upon them inevitably.  Take Prince Myshkin, who relates his empathetic description of the last five minutes of experience for a man condemned to death, knowing full well that in five minutes he won't be.  Take Alyosha, who lives through the death of Zosima, and subsequently leaves the monastery to take a principled stand in the world.  Take Kirilov, and his obsession with philosophical suicide.  To Kirilov, suicide is the ultimate act of freedom, the ultimate way to take hold of one's existence and prove it as one's own.  What we find in common with all of these characters is the fact that each one felt the tentacles of death drifting back from their future, confronting them in the present, and forcing them to face the world in a new way, their own way; this confrontation with death, with nothingness, with the potentiality of not-being, shakes them to a new awareness and causes them to take a stand on their own existence, to live authentically.  The trouble is, one can live authentically in many ways, for instance one could be an authentic murderer (Raskolnikov), an authentic idiot (Myshkin), an authentic asshole (Kirilov), or an authentic cannibal (to bring The Road into the picture).   Characters like Alyosha and Razumikhin, I feel, help point the way towards living authentically, but doing so in a way which has clear ethical principles, and practical/worldly principles, guiding and directing the unfolding of their authenticity.

   Look at the Road, we see the same sorts of archetypes unfolding.  We have the wife, who kills herself out of a rational principle.  Perhaps she’d read about Kirilov, or read Camus’ thoughts on suicide and disagreed with his conclusion on the matter.  In any case, with the wife we have that person who rebels against an absurd and inscrutable world, taking a stand on her existence by extinguishing it.  The state of mind of the father can easily be compared to that of Raskolnikov.  Both feel closed in upon by the world, and both are desperate to achieve some great goal for the better of someone besides themselves.  For Raskolnikov, that someone else is both his family, and society as a whole, the “greater good,” etc.  For “the man” from The Road, that someone else is quite clearly his son.  In both cases, a desperate state of mind leads them into error: for Raskolnikov this error is the calculative murder upon which he was trying to take the leap beyond moral categories, to take the leap into the shoes of a Napoleon, to become a force for good in the unfolding of history; for the man this error is his utter distrust of, and contempt for, every other soul that he encounters on his journey.  And this rotten mindset of the man’s was to be utilized for the noblest of goals, namely preserving the life of another whom one loves.  Raskolnikov and “the man,” took a stand on their existence, but both used distorted means in attempting to achieve their goal, and thus didn’t even achieve the goal at all.  This all suggests that we should give just as much attention to means as we should to ends, that we can’t be simple utilitarians, but neither can we be simple idiots.
   

[carnage_complex]

It's Sisyphus basically, you can approach life in one of two ways; as an insurmountable, anfractuous, tedious chore devoid of meaning (applicable to any lifestyle devoid of context) or as something possessed of real imaginative integrity irrespective of its eeeming mundanity.  Neither McCarthy's world nor Dostoevsky's is devoid of possibility, it's just faith masked by external travails.  I'm positive that McCarthy thinks this way, because nowhere in "The Road" do we learn anything about the primary nature of his apocalypse; who bombed out who, why the father and his son are wandering, etc.  It's irrelevant, because it's an all-pervasive form of human suffering that exists extraneous to context.  With Dostoevsky, too, life without suffering was totally gratuitous, pointless.  He says that if people were totally happy and cared for in every immediate sense, that they would kick up their own anthill for the hell of it just to assert their own individuality.  That is what we see in McCarthy; the world where people have basically destroyed themselves because they can.  Whatever superficial motives they had for doing so are irrelevant, as is basically everything else about the context.  The whole world is tired, so much of it goes without saying and McCarthy knew that giving us details would be tantamount to patronizing us...because he, like Dostoevsky, understands that certain realities are immutable. 
    I found Fyodor Karamazov‘ s jibes at hell in TBK to be very interesting.  FMD would not see hell in the same way as most people do; namely, as a gulf from God.  For him, as long as the metaphysical possibility of God‘ s existence was still on the table, the end justifies any how.  And that is how McCarthy‘ s world continues to stand, not despite outward travails but because of them.