Content area
Full Text
In The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy's approach to "naming differently" establishes the imaginative conditions for a New Earth, a New Eden. The novel diverges from the rest of McCarthy's oeuvre, a change especially evident when the book is set against Blood Meridian because their styles and concomitant worldviews differ so strikingly. The style of The Road is pared down, elemental: it triumphs over the dead and ghostly echoes of the abyss and, alternately, over relentless ironic gesturing. And it is precisely in The Road's language that we discover the seeds of the work's unexpectedly optimistic worldview. The novel is best understood as a linguistic journey toward redemption, a search for meaning and pattern in a seemingly meaningless world - a search that, astonishingly, succeeds. Further, I posit The Road as an argument for a new kind of fiction, one that survives after the current paradigm of excess collapses, one that returns to the essential elements of narrative.
Keywords: apocalypse / Cormac McCarthy / New Earth / The Road / style
Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning tenth novel The Road (2006) gives us a vision of after: after the world has come to disaster, after any tangible social order has been destroyed by fire or hunger or despair. McCarthy here surrenders his mythologizing of the past, envisioning instead a post-apocalyptic future in which human existence has been reduced to the basics.1 Though the book remains silent on the exact nature of the disaster that befell the planet some ten years prior, the grim results are clear. No plants grow, no sun shines through the ash-plagued sky and, save a single dog, no animals survive. The dead outnumber the living in shocking proportion, and of those few living humans, most are barely human at all: they are "men who would eat your children in front of your eyes," members of "bloodcults" bearing lead pipes and marching with chained slaves and catamites in tow (The Road 152, 14).2 The protagonists - an unnamed man and his young son - push a shopping cart across the wasted earth, freezing, starving and threatened at every turn, in search of the sea and in hope of a warmer, more hospitable place. Given the horrific devastation, we are not surprised that language...