I have questions for an essay on "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.McCarthy doesn't make explicit what kind of catastrophe has ruined the earth...

I believe that the circumstances that led to the scorched earth in The Road were from a nuclear attack, a war that was launched and so successful that most of the population has been eliminated. The devastation of the bombing which was engaged in by more than one nation served to destroy most of the world, most of the people on earth have been incinerated.

The world that is left behind has no social order, there is no law that keeps order in this new land, survival is dictated by whatever behavior works for the individual who has managed to stay alive through the devastation.

The annihilation of the human race is one aspect of the story, but the critical point that McCarthy makes through the man and his son's travels is that morality doesn't exist, there is a wild primitive element to the new world that they inhabit.

You come to wonder whether the boy and his father were in fact lucky to have survived the war, the destruction.  Their lives are a constant struggle, it is a world turned upside down by a lack of resources, no shelter is safe, there is no food, no way to create a stable setting to rebuilt your destroyed life.

The only thing that the man knows is that he and his son must keep traveling so as to escape the roving bands of thieves and murderers who now dominate the landscape.  In their efforts to survive the boy and his father also steal, but they do so without inflicting harm to anyone.  The father wants to protect the boy, because children have now become a choice selection on the menu where there are no more animals to cook and eat.

The society that McCarthy presents in The Road has devolved to the point of pre-civilization.  McCarthy brings civilization to a halt in his book, bringing the reader, with 21st century knowledge into a world where cannibalism is openly practiced.  This is similar to other pre-civilization societies who had little access to food sources and ate their own.

"Around 43,000 years ago, the Neanderthals were turning to cannibalism—even brain-eating—. Discoveries of fossil remains suggest that these prehistoric humans looked entirely different from their northern counterparts. The Osteology of this species clearly suggests signs of dismemberment and skinning."

I think what McCarthy is trying to tell the reader is that if society stays on the track that it is on, with ever increasing global hostility and more and more nations developing nuclear weapons, that our future might in fact bring us back to the past, the distant past.  The most frightening aspect of the book is that although the father and son have been sling shotted into the past, they have memories of a civilized society of laws and traditions, happy lives that now seem like a dream, their new life is a nightmare.