What's the bravest thing you ever did? He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.

This exchange is from Cormac McCarthy’s novel *The Road* (2006), set in a devastated post-apocalyptic landscape where a father and his young son travel south on foot, scavenging to survive amid starvation, illness, and the threat of violent marauders. The line is spoken by the father, whose health is failing (suggested by the “bloody phlegm”), in response to the boy’s question about bravery. In the novel’s bleak daily routine, simply continuing to move, wake, and care for the child becomes an act of will against despair and physical collapse.

McCarthy reframes “bravery” away from heroic spectacle and toward endurance. The father’s answer—“Getting up this morning”—treats survival itself as courage when life offers little hope and pain is constant. The bloody spit underscores that this is not metaphorical grit but bodily suffering and imminent mortality. The line also reveals the father’s protective honesty: he does not romanticize their situation for the boy, yet he models a stoic ethic of persistence. In *The Road*, moral identity (“carrying the fire”) is sustained through small, repeated choices to continue, even when the future is nearly unimaginable.