Why is the Relationship Between Philosophy and Literature of Significance for the Philosophy of Education?

Abstract

The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel of gargantuan vision framing an American landscape where a father and a son roam a country devoid now of civilization or culture or kindness, where now rule the antitheses of mayhem, anarchy, cruelty and cannibalism, where amoral bands wander in search of human meat. The father and the son, the only two truly moral characters in the novel, hold a metaphorical light to the dead and deadening landscape of an America wrecked beyond recognition by an unspecified catastrophe. Written in simple prose by the American writer Cormac McCarthy—an author renowned for narratives of the American west (The Border Trilogy) and the terrible, detached violence of the American city (No Country for Old Men)—The Road takes us with father and son through this landscape. There is good reason, no good argument, why the father feels the need to encourage the son, following the father's death, to carry still the light in this hell. And yet, likely for most readers, not only the light but the lives of these characters tell us too to carry what light we have. And we finish our reading of the novel—it is a novel, it is a made-up story, the world is not yet like that—perhaps also inclined for a while to carry the light.