Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a tale of survival that asks, why survive? Set in a dead world covered in ash and caked with dry dirt, it tells the story of a father and son making their way southward in search of safety from the harsh post-apocalyptic winter. "Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world." Someone broke everything, and nobody is working on it. It was already like this when the boy was born.

Insofar as The Road has a plot, it is cyclical: over and over again, the man and the boy find an abandoned structure—a house, a supermarket, a boat—and cautiously scour it for old tins and packages of grain that the scavenging wanderers somehow missed in the years since "the great long ago." They watch for other survivors as they travel. But signs of life are chilling, not encouraging. As the man tells his son, there are some good guys but there are a lot more bad guys. The bad guys eat people, so you have to be careful.

They travel with a shopping cart filled to overflowing with supplies salvaged from garages and deserted homes. There is a tarp in there, and some bedding. Sometimes there is some food. When they eat what they have, they get hungry again, and they look for more. Sleep is all that separates today from tomorrow. The man and the boy fight for life only so that they can keep living.

Maybe it was nuclear war, maybe it was a terrorist attack. All we see is the aftermath—it is Hemingway's Big Two Hearted River if all the trout were dead. Just as Hemingway never mentions World War I, so McCarthy leaves out the antecedent, telling us only that one night, many years ago, at a little past one in the morning, there was "a long shear of light" and "a series of low concussions." The man filled up his bathtub with water when the electricity went out; then everything ended, and the ash started to fall.

The purpose of the tragedy, from McCarthy's point of view, seems to return the world to some version of its original, primal state—to clear away the conditions of our modern life that have made truly epic writing, the kind with few jokes and no frivolous references, so prohibitively anachronistic. Culture has become lodged in our throats, and with the exception of a brief, embarrassing period after September 11, we have found ourselves unable to feel the beating of our own hearts. McCarthy cannot work like this.

Fourteen years ago, he told the New York Times Magazine that good writers are the ones who deal with life and death. Understandable, then, considering how much McSweeney's we've all been reading, that McCarthy felt he had to erase the world before he could properly do that. Inducing apocalypse may be an artificial device, but it works, and in the dark, rainy reality he creates, nothing remains except the astonishing descriptive power of his prose and an ahistorical hopelessness no less instinctual than the will to survive.

Only a writer with McCarthy's command of language could have found such stunning images with which to render desolation. On each page, he finds some new ruin to describe, whether it's the "long lines of charred and rusting cars" along the interstate with the "raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber" or the "dusty suits" the man finds in the back of a clothing store. The biggest descriptive triumph in the book takes place in a deserted house, when the man comes across a floor hatch while looking for food. He lifts the door open despite his son's protestations, and as he climbs down the wooden steps, he is hit with an "ungodly stench." When he swings the flame of his lighter down into the basement, he sees a wall, a mattress, and finally, the source:

On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.

Jesus, he whispered.

Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.

Realizing that they have accidentally walked into the prison cell of a maneater, the father and his son scramble for their lives and leave the reader cold with terror.

This chilling scene may be one of the most memorable in The Road, but McCarthy's abilities are most obvious when turned on the nothingness itself, on the bleak, gray scene outside. Early in the book, the man and the boy look south from atop a mountain: "the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste." In the next paragraph, the man and the boy are in the middle of it: "They were days fording that cauterized terrain." To find such dynamic words for stillness is an achievement, and the fact that McCarthy's descriptions of it never stop being surprising is what marks him as a master. His lyricism is no less delicate than a great poet's; appropriately enough, the book is not divided into chapters, but paragraphs that stand on their own like stanzas.

Beneath the surface of McCarthy's remarkable vocabulary lies a deep anxiety about the meaning of life in the absence of civilization. Page after page, the man and the boy refuse to give up, remaining slaves to their instincts even as they lie awake at night and envy the dead. They live for each other, because everything else has stopped existing: "No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later." It is hard to fathom, under such circumstances, what difference death could possibly make. And yet the man and the boy keep walking, putting one foot in front of the other and carefully planning their route. The road leads nowhere; the road never ends. "The ponderous spectacle of things ceasing to be." At the end of the world, The Road suggests, we see at last how it had always been.

Leon Neyfakh is a senior in History and Literature.