Carrying the Fire: Tragic Optimism on The Road
- Bobby Jakucs, Psy.D.
- Jul 26
- 9 min read
“You have to carry the fire.”
“I don’t know how to.”
“Yes, you do.”
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There’s a reason I return to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road every year, just like Brett McKay at The Art of Manliness. It’s not an easy book. The prose is spare and haunting. The world it depicts is brutal, ashen, stripped of color and warmth. And yet—I come back.
Because within its pages lies one of the most profound meditations on fatherhood, faith, and meaning in modern literature.
This post explores tragic optimism, a concept I first wrote about here. Viktor Frankl defined it as the ability to say “yes” to life in spite of everything: suffering, guilt, even death. The Road is a masterclass in this form of defiance—not through grand gestures but in the quiet persistence of a father and son who choose to carry the fire.
Spoilers ahead: If you haven’t read The Road, consider this your warning. But perhaps in a story like this, spoilers don’t spoil—they prepare you for the truth McCarthy reveals.
A Bleak World: Goodness Amidst Ashes
“The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true.”
The setting of The Road is almost suffocating in its bleakness. A father and son walk through a landscape of ash and silence, where humanity has fractured into cannibalistic gangs and feral loners. In such a world, McCarthy asks, what does it mean to be good? When all external structures of virtue are gone—laws, communities, churches—can goodness survive?
The father insists it can. Again and again, he tells his son:
“We’re the good guys. We carry the fire.”
The fire is never explained. It doesn’t need to be. It’s the flicker of conscience, of humanity, of love that resists the pull of despair. It’s the light that says goodness is worth preserving—not because it is rewarded, but because it is right.
Practical step: Reflect on your own “fire.” What values or truths do you carry even when no one sees? Write them down. Teach them to someone younger.
Faith Like Job: Wrestling With Silence
“Are you there? Will I see you at the 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.”
The man’s faith is not clean or easy. It’s desperate, raw—like Job’s, like the Psalmist’s cries from the pit. He prays into the silence, even curses at God, and yet the very act of crying out is itself an act of faith.
In the tradition of the Psalms, lament is not a failure of belief, rather, it is the language of faith when the world shatters. Like Job, the man in The Road does not receive answers, but he continues the conversation. His prayer, though stripped of comfort is still a reaching out toward God. It is honest in its anger and desperate in its plea.
This is faith is not a feeling. It is a decision. A decision to be faithful and remain in relationship, even when all signs of comfort are gone.
In his own way, the man's spiritual posture mirror's Christ's own cry from the Cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" A moment not of defeat but of the deepest solidarity with the suffering of every human heart in our darkest moments. It is a continuing on in faith, when all seems lost. Because in this life there are things worth hoping for, worth suffering for and if necessary worth dying for.
Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
The man suffers for his son. And in that, his faith—however battered—finds form.
Practical step: In your own dark nights, speak anyway. Pray, journal, whisper your fears. Faith is not the absence of doubt; it is often perseverance within it.
Love as Meaning: Willing the Good of the Other
“The boy was all that stood between him and death.”
The man’s reason for enduring isn’t philosophical. It’s flesh and blood. His son is his why. He shields him from horrors, scavenges food, even finds small joys—a can of Coca-Cola, shared like a sacrament.
Here we see what Bishop Robert Barron (drawing from Aquinas) calls the essence of love:
“To love is to will the good of the other, for the sake of the other.”
This is not self-serving affection. It is not a feeling. It is the man’s conscious choice to place his son’s well-being above his own fears and suffering. His wife chose nihilism, convinced life held nothing worth clinging to:
“They will rape us and kill us and eat us and you won’t face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen.”
The old man they encounter, Eli, has likewise resigned:
“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
But the father, though unable to articulate a logical rebuttal to either, persists. His reason is not an idea but a person.
And perhaps that is why McCarthy never gives us their names. In the Jewish tradition, the name of God was too sacred to be spoken aloud. So too here, the bond between father and son is something so profound, so intimate, that even the reader is held at a reverent distance. It is not for us to name. It is enough for us to witness.
Practical step: Name your “why” today. Who or what gives you strength to endure? Let that guide your choices.
The Weight of Sacrifice: Your Life Is Not About You
In the father’s journey we glimpse another of Bishop Barron’s insights: your life is not about you. True fulfillment comes not from self-preservation but from self-gift.
The father’s existence is reoriented around his son. This is his salvation. Though he dies before seeing the “promised land” of community his son eventually finds, he can die knowing he has fulfilled his mission. He has guarded his son—not only from physical death, but from the death of goodness in his soul.
The son now knows he was loved. He has a reason to hope.
And that love? It’s almost irrational in its depth. Why endure such suffering in a world gone so wrong? Why keep walking when logic would say there’s nothing left to walk toward? It is the same kind of love we see in the parable of the Good Shepherd:
“Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home.” (Luke 15:4–6)
It makes no sense. The shepherd already has ninety-nine sheep. By human logic, one lost sheep isn’t worth the risk. And yet he goes—and rejoices.
So too the father in The Road. His love for his son isn’t measured, calculated, or rational. It simply is. It is, in the words of St. Paul, the “foolishness of the Cross” (1 Cor 1:18)—a love that gives without expecting, that sacrifices without demand.
But it is this love that becomes the flame his son carries forward.
And in a deeper sense, this bi-directional relationship reflects the ultimate meaning of human life: to be drawn into the love of God, who in Christ wills our good not for His sake but for ours.
Practical step: Ask yourself: who am I willing to sacrifice for? What would it mean to live as though “my life is not about me”?
Carrying the Fire: Hope Against the Void
To carry the fire is to hold onto love, truth, and goodness even when all other lights go out. It is akin to Galadriel’s gift in The Lord of the Rings:
“May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”
It also echoes a warning from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a book written from the perspective of an older demon mentoring a younger demon on how to tempt a man away from God over the course of his life. In one chilling moment, the senior demon writes:
“Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
The man in The Road obeys—not God directly, perhaps, but the moral call of love etched on his heart. The fire is never fully explained. It in fact needs no explanation. We come to see what it is by how he lives: it is goodness for its own sake, truth when all the world seems mad, and love that persists even when unseen.
In a sense, this fire is like the Pascal flame in the Easter Vigil. Lit in the darkness, passed from candle to candle, generation to generation. It is not flashy. It promises no safety. But it defies the darkness by simply burning.
His son will carry the flame forward. Not because he was taught a lesson - but because he was loved into it. It is the same light we all yearn for and we all carry by virtue of our Baptisim, for after all, "In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1: 4-5).
Practical step: Do one small act of love today, something no one will see. This is how we keep the fire alive.
The Deeper Truth of Fiction
The Road is not true in the literal sense. It is (blessedly) a work of fiction. The real world is not a apocalyptic wasteland. But it is a myth and an epic that mirrors our internal struggles, particularly in the modern age. Tolkien, in On Fairy Stories, wrote "Myths are not lies. They are the best way of conveying certain truths." The Road while not true, is the furthest thing from a lie. Like the prophets of old it speaks hauntingly and beautifully to that which is most true.
And its truth? That even in ashes, love endures.
As Frankl discovered in the concentration camps, meaning is possible even amidst suffering. As McCarthy’s father shows us, love is reason enough to keep walking. And many times we need a stark reminder of both to keep going in our own lives.
G.K. Chesterton wrote:
“Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children dragons can be killed.” (Tremendous Trifles)
The Road is no fairy tale, but its dragon is despair. It is a reminder that even when the world is burned to ash, goodness still matters. That truth, love and beauty are worth carrying. Not because they are easy or but because they are good. And because they are good they are worth holding on to, even when we must do it alone.
The fire the man and the boy carry is not survival. It is not a brute strength. It is the flicker of sacrificial love and moral courage. It is a refusal to give in to the darkness. Although whispered in the void it is a resounding "yes" to life. Even when the joy of living is gone. It is a recognition that despite the horrifying conditions of life the fire burns brightly. Even when we don't feel its warmth.
And that fire, once carried can be passed on.
Practical step: Revisit stories—fiction or scripture—that remind you of hope. Let them teach you how to carry your own fire.
You Were Made For This
The Road asks us a haunting question: what will we carry when all else is stripped away? For McCarthy’s father and son, it is love. For us, perhaps it is too.
“This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up.”
To carry the fire is to live with tragic optimism—to embrace love, truth, and beauty even when the world feels ashen.
This is the heart of parenthood. This is the heart of the Cross. Christ Himself carried the ultimate fire into the darkness, even emptying Himself of glory to share in our humanity—and through His love, we find the light to keep walking.
So take courage. Even when the world is dark.
Even when you don't see the light.
You are not alone. You were made to carry the fire.
Even in the dark. Especially then.
May you carry it well.
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