Coping with Apathy: The Road & Frankl

Being part of a culture gives a person emotional grounding shaped by shared values. For instance, in a culture that values kindness, people may feel obligated to help a fellow motorist with a flat tire. Culture and individual rely on each other. If the person is lost, the culture loses a way to express itself. If the culture disappears, the person loses a sense of identity. Without that identity, and without finding a new one, they fall back on survival instincts—shedding empathy and becoming more self-serving or even predatory. When a culture values human life, its absence can lead to emotional detachment. The person becomes numb, using apathy as a way to cope.

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, apathy is found throughout the entirety of the plot. In an important event, it can be seen as a defensive response by the father against a looter. In the post-apocalyptic world without surviving cultures, a hungry man steals a boy and his father’s items.[1] After finding the thief, who returns the belongings at gunpoint, the father exercises his cultureless apathy to effectively kill the defenseless thief. Even though the father and his son have sufficient clothing, the father commands the now-defenseless and starving[2] man to “Take [his] clothes off,” as well as his shoes.[3] The man reacts, saying, “Come on, man. I’ll die,” which the father in simple retribution replies, “I’m going to leave you the way you left us.”[4] They leave the “nude and slatlike creature standing in the road shivering and hugging himself.”[5] If it can be assumed that, as in most world cultures, human life is worth saving (or it is at least morally injuring to participate in the death of another human), then that empathy of the past is no longer detectable in the father.

            Though a fictional story, this event in The Road can be dissected in light of Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl describes three phases that victims entering the Nazi concentration camps go through: shock, apathy, and post-liberation “depersonalization.”[6] In the transition to apathy, Frankl describes how “Disgust, horror and pity are emotions that our spectator could not really feel anymore. The sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such commonplace sights to him after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him any more.”[7] Frankl describes how apathy arises as a defensive mechanism.[8] Furthermore, it arises because of a lack of resources and the fact that they [the victims] “were treated like complete nonentities.”[9] In unpacking these sources of apathy, Frankl finds that apathy can be combated through spiritual freedom and the independence of mind.[10] This, Frankl describes, can be seen in “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”[11] In this, Frankl concludes, “the way in [one who is suffering] takes up his cross gives him ample opportunity…to add a deeper meaning to his life.”[12] In Frankl’s vision, this is the best post-collapse cultural medicine.

            In returning the encounter with the thief, the father is clearly left in a state of apathy after his culture was destroyed. He doesn’t care what happens to others, as long as he and his boy are safe. The boy acts as a foil against the father’s indifference to humanity because he, like Frankl explains, chooses an attitude with which to endure in an effort to derive a higher meaning in life. At several points, we see materializations of the boy’s effort to take up his “cross” with attitude, especially after the father has degraded another human. In the instance with the thief, the boy recognizes the immanence of death for that man after being stripped of possessions. The boy, clearly disturbed, shows empathy because he compels his father to “Just help him, Papa. Just help him.”[13] In his distress, the boy confesses his empathy when he acknowledges that “[the thief] was just hungy, Papa. He’s going to die…He’s so scared, Papa.”[14] This interaction betrays the boy’s selfless concern, indicating that he has a “deeper meaning in life.”[15] Frankl might affirm the boy’s concern for this human thus:

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”[16]

The boy recognized that, even though life was bleak, he had a “why” for his existence. McCarthy subtly dictates this to the reader in the pivotal moment when the father gives in to the boy’s distresses about the thief. The father attempts to justify his leadership to the boy by saying, “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything,” to which the boy profoundly responds, “Yes I am…I am the one.”[17] The boy’s response represents not the same worry as the father, a worry about survival, but a broader concern for any remnant of empathy humanity might still have.

It is holding on to empathy that, as Frankl would suggest, combats the onset of apathy for the boy. Though the father has succumbed to Frankl’s second phase, as defined by his treatment of other humans like the thief, the boy counterbalances by practicing empathy and therefore seems to maintain his humanity. Whereas the father has forgotten his “human dignity…in the bitter fight for self-preservation…and [has] become no more than an animal,”[18] the boy has proven himself “worthy of his sufferings.”[19] Ironically, it seems, the father had the privilege to experience culture prior to the apocalyptic event. Yet he is the one who has become apathetic and has lost his humanity. The boy, on the other hand, was born after the onset of the cultureless wasteland, but it is the boy who reintroduces empathy into the world because he has unknowingly followed Frankl’s method to combat the “decline” of the person.[20] This scene in The Road, in conjunction with Frankl’s phases of transition in the face of a cultural demise gives clear insight into just how profoundly self-healing and self-preserving it is to Love Thy Neighbor.

[1] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage 2006), p. 253.

[2] Id., 257. “I’m starving, man. You’d have done the same.”

[3] Id., 256-7.

[4] Id., 257.

[5] Id., 258.

[6] Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, translated by Ilse Lasch (Boston: Beacon Press: 2006): shock, see p. 8; apathy, see p. 20; post-liberation “depersonalization,” see p. 87 (“depersonalization” quoted from p. 88).

[7] Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 22.

[8] Id., 28.

[9] Id.

[10] d., 65.

[11] Id., 66.

[12] Id., 67.

[13] McCarthy, The Road, 259.

[14] Id.

[15] See n. 12.

[16] Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 80. Frankl examines a quote by Nietzsche, see p. 76.

[17] McCarthy, The Road, 259.

[18] Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 67.

[19] Id.

[20] Id., 71.