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I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.
—Cormac McCarthy, Whales and Men
The Holy Grail is a standard symbol in the English language for an object of search far-off, mysterious, out of reach.
—Dhira B. Mahoney, The Grail: A Casebook
Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), with its ashen, post-apocalyptic landscape, seems a striking departure from the realism of his earlier novels. Inspired in part by grim images of wanderers in "biohazard" suits or wearing masks and goggles "like ruined aviators" (The Road 51, 24), many critics identify the unnamed catastrophe that precipitates the novel as a nuclear holocaust (see e.g., Christman). McCarthy himself imagines the disaster to be a meteor strike, although he claims that "his money is on humans destroying each other before an environmental catastrophe sets in" (Kushner). Yet few critics have explored just how unusual the fantastic and futuristic landscape of The Road is. In an interview regarding the Coen brothers' film of his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, McCarthy claims that he prefers literary realism over more "magical" genres. "[I]t's hard enough to get people to believe what you're trying to tell them without making it impossible," he says. "You have to make it vaguely plausible" (Grossman 63). While The Road does bear McCarthy's typical attention to accuracy in all the minutiae of his descriptions, the excesses of carnage and apocalyptic horror in its pages may stretch the limits of credulity. In fact, one critic finds the world of the novel so sublimely damaged that it must have a "supernatural cause," and he therefore concludes that The Road is a retelling of the Book of Revelation (Grindley 12). The fantastic elements in the novel, however, are not supernatural allegory, but mythological motif. The novel's title in an early draft was The Grail,1 a title illustrative of the narrative arc in which a dying father embarks on a quest to preserve his son, whom he imagines as a "chalice" (McCarthy, The Road 64), the symbolic vessel of divine healing in a realm blighted by some catastrophic disease. The motifs of the Waste...