The End of the Road
The Road: a Twenty-First-Century Post-Apocalyptic Narrative as
a Complex Post-Romantic Allegory
Gert van Driel
1051180
MA Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture
17 December 2014
Supervisor: Dr. Evert Jan van Leeuwen
Second reader: Inge ’t Hart MA, MPhil.
Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1
Intertextuality ............................................................................................................. 3
The Romantic Origins of Apocalyptic Science Fiction ............................................. 3
The Significance of Allegory ..................................................................................... 9
Kant and the International Framework .................................................................... 10
Chapter 1: Perspectives on Survival Ethics in The Road: Cannibalism and Suicide... 14
1.1: Introduction ....................................................................................................... 14
1.2: Ethical Positions on Survival Cannibalism in the Romantic Period,
compared to The Road and Other Apocalyptic Narratives ...................................... 15
1.3: Ethical and Psychological Perspectives on Suicide in The Road and
Other Apocalyptic Narratives .................................................................................. 24
1.4: Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 30
Chapter 2: The Symbol of Fire and the Religious Propensities of Hope
in The Road .................................................................................................................. 31
2.1: Introduction ....................................................................................................... 31
2.2: The Fire: A Secular and Religious Symbol of Hope ........................................ 32
2.3: The Moral Radicalisation of People’s Characters in Regard to Hope .............. 36
2.4: The Road’s Tendency Towards the Theoretical Question of What to Hope .... 40
2.5: Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 45
Chapter 3: Romantic Perspectives on a Post-Apocalyptic Road Narrative ................. 46
3.1: Introduction ....................................................................................................... 46
3.2: The Post-Apocalyptic Narrative Shift............................................................... 46
3.3: A Road-Narrative: Place, Time and a Romantic Perspective ........................... 50
3.4: Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 55
Chapter 4: Man Against Nature: Allegorical Mode and Elements in The Road ......... 57
4.1: Introduction ....................................................................................................... 57
4.2: Allegorical Interpretation .................................................................................. 57
4.3: Allegorical Conventions in The Road ............................................................... 60
4.4: Return to the Cave: Plato Revisited .................................................................. 63
4.5: Horror Movies: Allegorising Trauma and the Human Condition..................... 66
4.5: Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 70
Conclusion. .................................................................................................................. 71
Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 75
Van Driel 1
Introduction
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the
absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling the intestate earth.
Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing
black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling
like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and
borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (McCarthy 138)
Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006) describes an ashengrey, “cold illucid world” (123), the anarchic aftermath of an unspecified worldwide
disaster. The pared-down writing style and the motifs of entropy and violence are
recurring elements in McCarthy’s works of fiction. According to Christopher Walsh,
parallels with The Road and other McCarthy novels can be found in its depiction of a
“wasteland that is littered with dead, dying, and at times ossified corpses” (257).
Ben Gerdts, describes how McCarthy’s “wasteland” has been interpreted
differently by various critics. Some
view[ed] such bloodshed as an extension of nihilism redirected as punishment
for humankind’s carelessness regarding the natural world; this resulted in
many ecological interpretations [of his works]. Other scholars discern
interpretative value in the storytelling, dialogism, and dialectic aspects of
McCarthy‘s fiction. (3)
Van Driel 2
In addition, Gerdts affirms that McCarthy’s works have been increasingly popular as
a subject of scholarly research (3).
Much of The Road’s critical reception and scholarly research indicates that the
novel reaches beyond the scope of any single literary or popular genre. Instead, its
popular as well as academic appeal lies in its trans-generic nature. As a Pulitzer Prize
-winning novel, a “national bestseller,” and the source for a Hollywood blockbuster,
The Road is a fictional narrative with great presence in Western culture today. Walsh
is one of many to acknowledge The Road’s cultural relevance: “It is clear that The
Road asks some profound questions about American culture and the relationship
between myth, history, and the national consciousness” (254). He claims that, to a
great extent, The Road satisfies a need for cultural identity through fiction.
Within a year after The Road’s publication in 2006, the novel won the
prestigious Pulitzer Prize, ranking it among the major literary works of the past
decade. While such a prize suggests that it is one of the major literary works of the
past decade, its bestselling status and adaptation into a motion picture warrant a
critical approach that takes into account a broader cultural context that includes the
contemporary popular genres of science fiction, its sub-genre of apocalyptic fiction,
and, as this thesis will show, also the literary movement of Romanticism.
A Romantic perspective on The Road might seem unexpected, but the chapters
in this thesis will reveal that the novel contains many literary techniques, motifs and
themes that can be traced back specifically to Romantic texts in the apocalyptic
tradition, as well as philosophical ideas concerning human ethics that were developed
within Romantic and later science fiction literature, initially in response to Kantian
ethics. These specific themes and ideas will serve as the framework of reference for
this research, to be introduced and placed in context in the following subsections.
Van Driel 3
Intertextuality
Arthur Asa Berger explains that “texts […] are suspended between the past and the
future. They are intertextual […] in that they are affected, to varying degrees, by texts
that have preceded them and have, to varying degrees, affected their creators, and, at
the same time, they also anticipate the future” (36). By reading The Road within an
intertextual network containing core ideas from Kant’s ethical philosophy, Romantic
apocalyptic literature, as well as modern apocalyptic science fiction stories that
further developed the Romantic apocalyptic strain, it is possible to explain why and
how The Road’s style and motifs create such poignant melancholic perspectives on
the influence of the environment on the moral framework of the characters in the
novel, its ethical positions on respect for life and the self, on hope where none can be
reasonably given, and the transcendental question of what happens after death.
According to Berger, “our creativity” is “dialogical” (93), “our writing or
speech is always connected to ideas and thoughts that have been communicated in the
past” (35). The Road brings into conversation with each other Kantian ideas
concerning ethics, that have been appropriated by Romantic writers, whose themes
and modes of representation have since been appropriated and transformed by writers
of modern apocalyptic science-fiction.
The Romantic Origins of Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Modern Anglo-American apocalyptic fiction is of course deeply rooted in Western
religious apocalyptic traditions, but in the framework of this thesis, the literary
apocalyptic traditions of science fiction and Romanticism are more relevant.
According to David Ketterer, modern apocalyptic literature draws upon “the poetry of
the romantics” (ix), particularly Blake and Byron.
Van Driel 4
According to Birch, Romanticism is “a literary movement, and profound shift in
sensibility, which took place [throughout] Europe roughly between 1770 and 1848”
(842). Politically, the movement “was inspired by the revolutions in America and
France,” giving it its international status. It was especially in its response to these
Revolutions that Romanticism revealed its apocalyptic tendency. Looking back at the
age of Revolution, the British poet Robert Southey wrote: “Old things seemed passing
away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race” (“The
French Revolution”, n.p.). Southey’s diction attests to the Romantics’ desire for
change, their focus on the future, but also their emphasis on the importance of the
imagination.
While “in the early 1790s, the first generation of Romantic poets incorporated in
their poems a vision of the French Revolution as the early stage of the abrupt
culmination of history, in which there will emerge a new humanity on a new earth
that is equivalent to a restored paradise,” (“The French Revolution”, n.p.) not all
Romantic writing presents the apocalypse in such millennial terms. In Darkness
(1816), Byron created a powerful image of an apocalypse that corresponds much
more to the modern popular understanding of the term. Instead of expressing a vision
of regeneration, Byron’s poem depicts a darkening, dying world:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
Van Driel 5
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation. (ll.1-8)
Byron’s poem was written and published after the French Revolution had proven to
be as destructive as it had been regenerative. It represents the other extreme of the
Romantic apocalyptic imagination, an obsession with the end. Significantly, The Road
shares with Darkness almost all its major literary symbols and narrative depictions of
the wasteland.
Both narrators express an extremely pessimistic view of human life and
existence. The Road is not entirely conclusive on the subject of the apocalypse. Byron
surpasses McCarthy by presenting a world entirely lacking a moral framework, or
sense of hope: the darkness makes no distinction between the religious or morally
just; the narrator suggests there is no future or an afterlife. The entire world of
Darkness is destroyed and ends as “a lump of death—a chaos of hard clay” (l. 72);
similarly, the world in The Road has become “silent, barren, godless” (2). The
personification of the dying earth prompts an allegorical interpretation of these texts,
as texts concerned with the changing human condition, as will be discussed Chapter 4.
Apocalyptic fiction presents a future where contemporary social developments
and values are pushed to technological or moral limits, using the end-of-the-world
scenario as a “pretext for reorganising society,” as was the case in the early positive
Romantic apocalyptic vision of the French Revolution, or its “destruction” (Bould and
Vint, ch. 2), following the Byronic apocalyptic vision. Narratives of apocalyptic
fiction commonly contain either a natural or man-made disaster as plot device. There
are also two different versions of post-apocalyptic narratives. In one, the chaos that
ensues in its aftermath is often set right again with the resourcefulness of a few
Van Driel 6
people, but in the other, a natural equilibrium is reached between humans and their
environment. As a result of this natural balance, the survivors have organised
themselves in smaller communities, often under primitive circumstances, reminiscent
of the Romantic “antipathy towards society” (Day 41), and “sometimes deeply
resistant to science and technology” (Bould and Vint, ch. 5).
Since the Romantic period, the central themes of apocalyptic fiction can be
traced back to contemporary social, political or technological developments. Some of
these themes are elitist control over the last resources of food, using coercive methods
of authority, including references to cannibalism, as in Shelley’s The Last Man
(1826), Byron’s Darkness, or films such as Soylent Green (1973). Works within the
genre, since the Romantic age, also often explore what happens to the mind-set of
humankind in the face of extinction by, for example, nuclear fallout, as in Neville
Shute’s On The Beach (1949); mankind’s return to a primitive society as in Richard
Jefferies’ After London (1885); unstoppable pandemics and other biological causes
that threaten the human race with extinction, as again The Last Man (1826) or
Stepgen King’s The Stand (1978). All of these examples of apocalyptic fiction
describe a vulnerability and defencelessness of the human species against the
immense, destructive powers of nature or humankind itself.
One of the very first modern popular fiction texts to introduce the abovementioned themes was Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), often defined as the first
science fiction narrative. Sceptical of the beneficent effects of certain contemporary
scientific developments, Shelley provided a critique of science; the novel’s plot
revolves mainly around the disastrous aftermath caused by the monstrous creation of
the novel’s protagonist Dr Victor Frankenstein. While Frankenstein explores
mankind’s potential to destroy himself and his world, Shelley’s fourth novel is a
Van Driel 7
fully-fledged apocalyptic narrative. It was the first novel to describe how mankind is
unable to survive the cause of a natural occurring disaster, the relentlessness of a
global pandemic, despite modern science and politics.
Despite being a ground-breaking work of Romantic apocalyptic fiction, The
Last Man was not republished between 1833 and 1965. It did instigate a boom in
apocalyptic fiction in the nineteenth century. Wagar explains that Poe’s “The Masque
of the Red Death” (1842), Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887) and Jefferies’ After London
(1885) are all closely related to Shelley’s novel (Ch.2). The Romantic critique of
science and fearful vision of the destructive powers of nature – in the shape of disease
– have remained staple ingredients of apocalyptic fiction and thus Shelley’s forgotten
work remains a key intertext to new productions within the genre.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, H.G. Wells coined the term
“Fantastic and Imaginative Romances” to define his own brand of science fiction
(Stableford 468). When the omnibus The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells (1933)
was published, Wells personally accepted the more popular term “scientific romance”
for his works. The term describes both elements of fictional and scientific writing, and
during the second half of the twentieth century, scientific romance came to refer to the
British variety of science fiction that was written between 1850 and 1920 (468), the
immediate post-Romantic aftermath. Scientific romances were narratives that
depicted the world from an evolutionary, but necessarily positivist, perspective. Like
Shelley’s novel, they had little interest in heroism, and painted a future in which
political and technological mayhem has become the human condition. H. G. Wells
and Arthur Conan Doyle even introduced nameless protagonists in a few of their
novels, who much like Byron’s and Shelley’s characters were defenceless in the face
of natural forces.
Van Driel 8
In 1929, Hugo Gernsback introduced the term “Science Fiction,” which would
replace scientific romance. Gernsback was an editor of one of the world’s first science
fiction magazines, Amazing. By publishing his works through channels of popular
fiction, trying to seek “a degree of literary, intellectual and moral respectability to his
pulp endeavour,” he played an important part in “enabling SF to be perceived as a
distinct genre” (Bould and Vint, ch. 1).
While demonstrating a fascination for scientific ideas and developments, it is
important to remember that early science fiction, as a literary movement, also
continued Romanticism’s critical response the industrial, political and scientific
revolutions. While often looking forward, works of science fiction also express
“anxiety about humanity and its social order as currently configured” (Bould and
Vint, ch. 2). This interest in exploring what William Blake in “London” called “the
mind-forg’d manacles” (l. 8) that stifle human understanding, is a Romantic aspect of
the genre that has remained integral to its identity since its beginnings. For example,
in The Time Machine (1895), Wells constructed a narrative that has been interpreted
as a critical exploration of Darwinist ideas about the “future evolution” of mankind
(485). Wells’ science-fiction classic also has an allegorical level: time travel is merely
a plot device that enables the narrative to figuratively explore notions of socialism
and, according to Wells, “the inequities, injustices, and hypocrisies of contemporary
society that were ripe for eradication” (566). In this last statement Wells showed
himself the literary heir to the Romantic radical philosopher and novelist William
Godwin, as well as his disciple Percy Shelley, who at the turn of the nineteenth
century had a similar vision of how the products of their imagination would
regenerate a dying society.
Van Driel 9
The Significance of Allegory
In the nineteenth century, allegory remained an important literary technique, despite
the resistance of many Romantics.1 In Reinventing Allegory (1997), Theresa Kensey
describes how the technique has developed through modern literature, and argues that
it a “reminder of the unremitting problem of universals and their material of figural
substantiation” (119). In essence, this means that allegorical narratives depict “people
as things” and ideas (119). Of course, it is also possible to sever the character or
person from the depicted idea, when the author has skilfully mastered the art of
suspension of disbelief, and has created a believable character. Nevertheless, allegory
involves a universalist philosophical approach, as it transforms characters into
personifications and abstractions, mostly of ethical positions like good or evil, which
drew a poet like Percy Shelley to turn to allegory for one of his most political poems,
“The Mask of Anarchy.” Romantic scholar, Paul de Man, claims that allegory was in
fact used often in Romantic literature. He describes how, for example, Wordsworth
used allegory in his poetry:
The prevalence of allegory always corresponds to the unveiling of an
authentically temporal destiny. This unveiling takes place in a subject that has
sought refuge against the impact of time in a natural world to which, in truth,
it bears no resemblance. (qtd. Day 118)
De Man has surveyed the use of figurative language from the later eighteenth through
the nineteenth centuries, and found the use allegory never actually disappeared during
Despite the Romantics’ resistance to allegory, some of the major Romantic poems invite allegorical
readings; Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” for instance.
1
Van Driel 10
the Romantic age. He adds that Romantics did characterise “allegory negatively” and
scorned it for “being merely a reflection” (qtd. Day 114); therefore, it was not a
literary device that was mentioned often.
Russell Hillier explains that “McCarthy scholarship has long appreciated his
novels’ affinity with allegory” (53). He points out that Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678), “as one of the most prominent allegories in the English language,” can be
regarded as a precursor to The Road’s themes of “pilgrimage and restless wandering”
(Hillier 53). As this thesis will show, these themes are as much Romantic as Christian
themes. I will propose that McCarthy’s The Road is in fact as much a complex
“Romantic” allegory as a work of apocalyptic fiction; through its apocalyptic
narrative, it expresses sentiments concerning the human condition at the beginning of
the twenty-first century, but does so through Romantic literary techniques, motifs and
forms of reasoning.
Kant and the International Framework
While The Road’s relation to other apocalyptic and science-fiction narratives, motifs,
and philosophical ideas has been researched and studied separately, this thesis will
situate The Road in a fuller intertextual network that exists at the centre of the
overlapping genres of apocalyptic fiction, science fiction and Romanticism. In
addition, I would like to point out that, in this thesis, science fiction and Romanticism
are seen as international genres and movements. Even though The Road depicts the
end of the entire world, McCarthy’s works have been considered quintessentially
American, and this novel’s setting is also decidedly American. An intertextual
approach warrants an international approach, however, as it explores the exchange
and cross-fertilisation of literary, themes, motifs and intellectual ideas. Romanticism
Van Driel 11
and science fiction are international literary movements, and the ideas, motifs and
literary techniques that have become central to Romanticism and science fiction have
developed from the outset by means of international exchange of print culture.
The role of Kantian philosophical ideas in this thesis is exemplary of this
international framework. Kathleen Wheeler, for instance, speaks of “the major impact
that Kant consolidated, if not actually produced, on the minds of his younger
contemporaries such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats” (42). Her essay
on Kant’s impact on Romanticism reveals that philosophical ideas, as well as literary
tropes developed within an international intellectual culture and were not nation
bound. She concludes, “Kant’s great influence on romanticism was…the
systematization of the mind as synthetic and creative, and not merely as associative
and selective” (46). Poets like Coleridge and
Shelley never developed a philosophic system designed to articulate a final
worldview, seeking rather to experiment with the implications of the synthetic
powers of the imagination (understood as a field for activity) and of metaphor as
a direct instrument and form of human knowledge. (Wheeler 51)
Many Romantic writers adopted the concepts of human reason Kant used. Even
though they never fully integrated his proposed systemisation of it, they particularly
attributed human intuition and imagination as higher functions in human reason.
In relation to this division, Kant’s Critiques of Pure Reason united two
tendencies: the spatiotemporal world and the rational world. He also identified a
higher function in human reason, a way to intuitively reach beyond the rational world
into the theoretical, and determine the philosophical positions of ethics, law and duty.
Van Driel 12
According to Kant, “intuition” was a conceptual attribute every individual possessed.
Kant’s Critiques of Pure Reason influenced many Romantic thinkers, as they
borrowed his ideas of how the human mind could somehow order, shape and impose
significance on life. The Road shares with much Romantic writing an indebtedness to
the general principles – if not the specific philosophical arguments - of Kant’s
thoughts on ethics. This will be explored in more detail in Chapter 1 of this thesis.
In order to fully grasp the intricacy of The Road’s intertextual web and
Romantic debt, chapter one will contrast the way McCarthy portrays the apocalyptic
motifs of cannibalism and suicide, common plot elements in many works of dark
Romanticism and science fiction. The chapter will show how these motifs facilitate
the radicalisation of the moral framework of The Road’s characters. This
radicalisation can be explained by reading the narrative in light of Kantian
metaphysics. Therefore, chapter one will also investigate and discuss the presence and
relevance of the concepts of cannibalism and suicide in Immanuel Kant’s theories
from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Fundamental Principles of the
Metaphysic of Morals and Critique of Pure Reason. The primary purpose of this is to
explore the moral framework of The Road in reference to the Romantic idea of
universal ethics.
According to M.H. Abrams, many Romantic thinkers attempted “to reconstitute
the grounds of hope”; as a consequence, they wondered “how a renewed mankind will
inhabit a renovated earth” (qtd. in Day 4). For example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
not only chronicles the collapse of civilisation. It is also an elegy for lost loved ones, a
reflection on the pointlessness of contemporary Western ideals in the face of
extinction. To Lionel, one of the novel’s protagonists, God is absent while everyone
he loves dies. Eventually, there is no hope for an afterlife. In this sense, The Last
Van Driel 13
Man’s hopelessness is unique, and there would be no novel like it in post-apocalyptic
fiction until On The Beach (1957). The Road is one of the latest narratives to achieve
the same level of hopelessness. The main purpose of chapter two is to explore the
concept of hope in The Road, in context of the post-apocalyptic survivalism of its
main characters. The concept will be regarded from a religious perspective, but also
from a secular perspective, because Kant regarded the act of hope to be of both a
rational and a religious tendency.
Chapter three will compare and contrast literary techniques such as plotting,
narrative voice and style in The Road and other works of Romantic and SF
apocalyptic fiction. This chapter will offer a more thorough understanding of the
complex literary nature of McCarthy’s work, and how its hybrid identity as a
Romantic, SF apocalyptic narrative allows it to reflect in a unique way on the
philosophical questions it raises. What is left of a person’s humanity and moral
identity when literally everything else is stripped away, including the empirical
evidence of hope for humanity’s survival?
Chapter 4 will focus specifically on The Road’s figurative language and its
allegorical potential by comparing the narrative to two key forms of allegory, the
“Cave Allegory” from Plato’s The Republic (380 BC) and John Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). The chapter ends with an analysis of the reference to one
of the most recent forms of allegorical story-telling, zombie horror, in The Road: “We
are the walking dead in a horror film” (7).
Van Driel 14
Chapter 1: Perspectives on Survival Ethics in The Road: Cannibalism and
Suicide
1.1: Introduction
This chapter will explore the themes of cannibalism and suicide in The Road, in
relation to Romantic works like Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and apocalyptic
science fiction stories such as Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Shute’s On the
Beach (1957), amongst others. What will become clear from this comparative analysis
is how both cannibalism and suicide are recurring motifs in the tradition of
apocalyptic writing in works of the Romantic period, contemporary science fiction
and The Road, and how these motifs add to the construction of their protagonists’
moral framework. In addition to this, this chapter will show that The Road contains
Kantian positions concerning respect for human life and dignity for the individual.
Regarding cannibalism and murder, the two protagonists of The Road have
created a moral framework in which the good “carry the fire” (136) and “dont kill”
(274), and the bad “eat people” (304) and “kill” (58). The post-apocalyptic
circumstances in The Road have created a situation in which only a handful of people
are able to uphold such a moral framework. Both the protagonist’s late wife – who
has committed suicide – and the bloodcults seem to have lost respect for their own or
other people’s lives, and by this reasoning, convey they act out of necessity, not out of
freedom. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Eldridge explains, “Kant calls our
consciousness of freedom ‘the most insoluble of problems’ and argues that it stems
from our awareness of [moral] law” (14). For the cannibals, the ends justify the
means. The protagonist’s wife uses the same normative ethical argument, but
oppositely, for fear of prolonged suffering and loss of dignity, she kills herself.
Van Driel 15
According to Eldridge, “the idea of an understanding of our plights, powers and
possibilities that draws us in, yet cannot be grounded in any discovery of properties of
substances, lies at the heart of Kant’s critical philosophy” (13). In The Road, these
“plights, powers and possibilities” form the foundation of the moral framework of the
novel as well. The only existing moral framework seems to be in the hands of the man
and the boy, who’s innate ethics seem to survive outside of any social, legal, or other
manmade institution.
1.2: Ethical Positions on Survival Cannibalism in the Romantic Period,
compared to The Road and Other Apocalyptic Narratives
Cannibalism as a survival method is a central motif of apocalyptic fiction. In reality,
survival cannibalism can be found in extreme situations of survival. In this
perspective, cannibalism is mostly described as an innate drive to survive, which
signifies that it is used as a last resort, when all other sources of food have depleted.
Under those circumstances, one can either choose to live or die. The choice to die
could lead to suffering a slow, painful death of hunger. The only alternative to
suffering and death is suicide. This section will show that The Road follows both
Romantic and later Science Fiction narratives in using the motif of cannibalism as the
basis for its protagonists’ moral framework; it is one of their ethical criteria.
In case of survival cannibalism, the moral dilemma is comprised of a lethal
aspect opposing the instinct of survival: kill or die. The situation for this dilemma
arises when the killing of one or more persons creates better chances of survival for
the others, provided that the second group already had better chances of survival. The
circumstances that created the dilemma in the first place are isolated from the
survivors’ original cultural or social background. Once returned from the moral
Van Driel 16
context created during survival circumstances, the experience is regarded from the
person’s original moral perspective. At that moment, it becomes a matter of
conscience, because the survivor has killed and eaten another human being. Survival
circumstances put cannibalism into a different perspective, and according to Jennifer
Brown, “examples of this type of cannibalism are found in times of war and hardship,
such as under Mao’s dictatorship in China, during the Siege of Leningrad, on board
stranded ships, or during the first explorations of the Poles” (6).
Against comparable survival circumstances, The Road’s two protagonists have
created a micro-society of their own. Isolated from the man’s original cultural and
social background, they are marooned in a different world, just like the early
explorers of the poles, or people besieged in a war-ridden country, bereft of any
natural sources of food. Except, they do not kill other humans to eat their flesh in
order to survive, but persist in searching for tinned food and other edible things. In
essence, the man tries to protect his son’s future conscience. The man holds them to
the moral framework “the good.”
Survival cannibalism in Romantic fiction can be found in, for example, Edgar
Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). During his
second voyage, Pym, after having been deliriously seasick, having survived a mutiny
and a severe storm, narrates how they are confronted with an ethical dilemma. With
no sign of rescue, the men face death by starvation and thirst, so a fellow shipmate
named Richard Parker suggests that one of them should be killed as food for the other
survivors. Following a certain marine custom, to which this chapter will refer later,
they all draw straws. Pym considers their situation, by saying that “there are few
conditions into which man can possibly fall where not feel a deep interest in the
preservation of his existence; an interest momentarily increasing with frailty of the
Van Driel 17
tenure by which that existence may be held” (Poe 180). Ironically, Richard Parker, the
same character who proposed the idea, is drawn. Arthur continues his thoughts before
the deed is done, and says in defence that “before any one condemn me for this
apparent heartlessness, let him be placed in a situation precisely similar to my own”
(Poe 181). Essentially, he refers to cannibalism as a last resort for survival, not
entirely unique to nineteenth-century marine customs, as Brown explains: “[By] the
eighteenth-century cannibalism among sailors in survival times had come to be
regarded as ‘regrettable but practically unavoidable’, and was addressed in a ‘darkly
comedic manner’ in broadsheets and penny ballads” (221).
One of these cases in marine history closely resembles Poe’s narrative. The
following incident dates to 1886, when four men on a ship, called the Mignonette,
were en route from England to Australia. Their lifeboat became adrift, after the ship
sank in the Atlantic. “When, months later, they were picked up, barely alive, there
were only three left. The youngest, a boy of 17, was missing. He did not drown but
was killed and eaten - by his fellow shipmates” (Lewis). As it happened, the boy’s
health had declined. After some consideration, his fellow shipmates killed him and ate
him, instead of waiting for the young man to die of natural causes. “They made no
attempt to conceal the truth. They felt justified by what was called ‘the custom of the
sea’ - the sacrifice of one seaman's life to save others. Nonetheless, they were put on
trial for murder” (Lewis). During their isolation from society, they had to overcome
their innate moral framework to justify their act of cannibalism.
The isolation of the Mignonette shipwreck not only created the opportunity for a
new moral framework. Their moral framework was derived from “the custom of the
sea,” which included several survival principles and guidelines. One of these practices
became drawing straws. The needs justified the means, consequently opening doors
Van Driel 18
for alternative principles of the ethics of survival. Bentham’s theory of Utilitarianism
complements that, if need be departed from traditional principles, “these are the real
difficulties, the knotty points in the theory of ethics, as in the conscientious guidance
of personal conduct. They are overcome practically, with greater or lesser success,
according to the intellect and virtue of the individual” (Troyer 114). The sailors’
guidance of personal conduct was externalised by drawing straws, and the person
holding the shortest straw was the first to be eaten.
In apocalyptic fiction, these “customs” are usually dramatised or implicated
with a sense of horror. In Max Brooks’ World War Z (2007), American survivors try
to escape the zombie-apocalypse by fleeing to the Northern parts of the United States
and Canada. Due to the unforgiving winter, the resulting hunger and extreme famine
drive some of the survivors to “questionable survival methods” (Brooks 364),
implying that they have turned to cannibalism. Except for the behaviour of “the
infected,” the book does not describe in particular what these “survival methods”
involved. The film Soylent Green (1973) depicts an example of cannibalism as
“questionable survival method” on a grand scale. The film is based on Harry
Harrison’s dystopian novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966). A structural food
shortage due to overpopulation and pollution has created a dystopian setting. The
story ends with the uncovering of a well-organised, secret government scenario
supported by the Soylent Corporation, which employs the processing of human flesh
as a primary food source. Accordingly, civilians were not exposed to a moral conflict,
which remained limited to the government, who seem to have overcome the
associated moral dilemma. Most people continued to be unaware of eating a food
product made of human remains, at least, until the protagonist find out “Soylent
Green is people!”
Van Driel 19
In Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic novel The Stand (1978), a character called
Lloyd wrestles with his moral principles. He is on the verge of committing a
cannibalistic act and is locked in prison while the outside world has succumbed to a
pandemic of Biblical proportions. He is marooned in his cell without food or chance
of escape, while a leg of one of the prison guards is sticking through the bars of his
cell. “There were teeth-marks there. Lloyd knew whose teeth had made those marks,
but he had only the vaguest memory of lunching on filet of [the prison guard]. All the
same, powerful feelings of revulsion, guilt, and horror filled him” (King 515). The
last scene demonstrates how Lloyd is experiencing a moral dilemma, and is more
explicit on the “questionable” aspect of the survival method.
The Road also provides a literary testing ground for cannibalistic behaviour in a
survival setting. The setting is a world completely destroyed by an undefined disaster,
and its characters are constantly on the brink of starvation or hyperthermia. Natural
food resources have been depleted, the world’s population is decimated, and the
temperature never seems to rise to comfortable levels again. The following passage
from The Road describes a world on the verge of a moral and physical transformation,
in which people would eat human flesh and ransack through what is left of cities:
A world soon populated by men who would eat your children in front of your
eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who
tunnelled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye
carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the
commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid
ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came
early […]. (192)
Van Driel 20
This passage appears to be prophetic. Later, the man and the boy witness a gruesome
scene during one of their searches for food. Following a trail of smoke and a smell of
cooking, the man notices a fire has just been abandoned. “They left their food
cooking” (211). The man suspects the people who lit the fire fled because “they saw
we had a gun” (211), and they might have been ashamed of what they were doing:
“What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and
blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with
him, holding him close. I’m sorry, he whispered. I’m sorry” (212). This scene is very
unsettling to the boy. The boy is upset, because his moral compass is guided by his
father’s experience to see the difference between people who “eat other people” and
people who “dont” (304). Evidently, a moral framework is present regarding this
difference. The boy has gained an understanding of a moral concept in the form of a
universal law in which good people “carry the fire” (136), whereas bad people,
amongst other things, “eat people” (304). His intuition to trust new people serves this
principle, as demonstrated by the following conversation, just after the man has died:
How do I know you’re one of the good guys?
You don’t. You’ll have to take a shot.
[…]
You don't eat people.
No. We don't eat people.
And I can go with you?
Yes. You can.
Okay then. (304)
Van Driel 21
The boy seems to think that the only relevant question to ask in order to trust these
people, is whether they “eat people” and are therefore “bad” (304). The moral
principle is, that bad people eat people.
In reference to the metaphor of the father and son being marooned in a changed
world with different morals and means of survival to their own, they are both depicted
by the narrator as the more civilised in the world of The Road. In fact, the
“bloodcults,” “road-agents,” or “marauders,” represent the natives in The Road, but
the names signify the same idea in the us-versus-them framework of the father. The
father and his son distinguish themselves from the metaphoric natives they encounter
through their innate ethics.
The man and his son apply the good-and-bad principle as a universal law of
ethics, believing their conduct will lead to salvation, if only for the son. For such a
presentation of ethics “at work,” so to speak, McCarthy is indebted to Romantic
thought. In his Lectures of Ethics Kant took a stand against cannibalism, and
explained how it diminishes the possibility of a moral construct:
[Humans] have, indeed, no inclination to enjoy the flesh of another, and where
that occurs, it is more a matter of warlike vengeance than inclination; but there
remain in him an inclination that may be called appetite, and is directed to the
enjoyment of the other. This is the sexual impulse. [As] soon as anyone
becomes an object of another’s appetite, all motives of a moral relationship
fall away. (27: 384-386)
Deducing from this quote, the cannibals’ moral development to act on instinct only
Van Driel 22
have resulted in a lack of “motives for a moral relationship.” This is how their society
functions in relation to their need for survival. From this can be concluded that the
Father and Son form one society, and the cannibals another. In The Road, the moral
framework of the man and the boy opposes the one of the cannibals, and from the way
in which the novel uses the father and the son as focalizers, it is conceivable, in line
with Kant’s reasoning, that the cannibals do not have any.
The idea of two post-apocalyptic societies evolving divergently, recalls the
cultures of the Morlocks and the Eloi as presented in The Time Machine. To a certain
extent, Wells’ novel also depicts an irreversible decline of humankind. As opposed to
The Road’s suggested fate of the world, in The Time Machine, humankind has
survived in a distant future, and has developed into two humanoid races: the cunning,
cannibalistic Morlocks and their source for food, the gentle Eloi. Published in 1895,
The Time Machine extended the Romantic fascination for exploring life after death,
on the grandest scale. Where Godwin turned to the immortality of alchemy in St Leon
(1799) to explore through one man’s eyes the socio-political developments of
centuries, and Shelley relied primarily on the powers of his own poetic genius to
visualise the death and rebirth of mankind, Wells’ protagonist is able to take a look
into the future by means of a quintessential science fiction device called a time
machine.2 The vehicles are different but the literary purpose is the same. Like
Shelley’s “Last Man,” the protagonist of The Road survives an apocalypse to witness
his own future. The similarity with The Time Machine in regard to The Road also lies
in the plot element that in the distant future of The Time Machine, all forms of moral
Stephen Burt explains that The Time Machine “offers a new symbol for the afterlife
in almost every chapter, combining its extrapolations of social trends (class
separation) and physical trends (entropy)” (173).
2
Van Driel 23
and supernatural authority seem to have become obsolete. All forms of devotion are
directed towards the hollow idol of a sphinx, and the Eloi and Morlocks represent the
good and bad in Well’s novel, but their spiritual behaviour does not indicate any need
for a hope in a different future. Nevertheless, whereas the symbol of fire, as token of
goodness and hope, remains the moral focus of the narrative in The Road, the
corresponding focus in The Time Machine is just the time traveller’s hope to return to
his own past.
McCarthy’s protagonist acts like a metaphoric time traveller – or Romantic
Immortal – to some extent, as he is able to explore the afterworld in the context of
post-apocalyptic survivalism. While “Wells’ Time Traveller becomes [tomb raider],
discovering secrets that belong to the dead” (Burt 173), McCarthy’s protagonist is
also stranded in a horrible future, and finds out that most of mankind has reverted to
savagery and cannibalism. The cannibals of The Road are like a group of stranded
sailors in time. These bloodcults have chosen for the principle of survival through
cannibalism. However, according to earlier relevant examples in this chapter, all
persons or characters who commit acts of cannibalism had to find a way to live with
themselves after, were sometimes accused for the immoral behaviour on their return
or experienced the guilt following their “questionable methods” (Brooks 364).
In McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic narrative, there is no one left to pass judgment
on the cannibal’s practices, but the father feels obliged to create a situation in which
his son is able to live with a clear conscience. He educates him according to his own
principles, hoping his son is strong enough to survive the hostile world of The Road.
The moral framework he and his son have created, serves this purpose. Nevertheless,
despite the father’s efforts and intentions, it is only a hollow principle. His son has to
live the remainder of his life in an empty world. This world, as the narrative explicitly
Van Driel 24
indicates several times, is not yet void of people, but it is deprived of all natural
resources. This leaves the boy no chance of survival, and eventually, there will be no
life left to experience any form of guilt, and the use of any moral framework will
vanish with the death of the last human on earth.
1.3: Ethical and Psychological Perspectives on Suicide in The Road and Other
Apocalyptic Narratives
Suicide is also a returning element in apocalyptic fiction. As will become evident in
this part of the chapter, the innate ethical nature of suicide in apocalyptic fiction
comes closer to a form of self-euthanasia than an act of suicide associated with mental
disorders. The focus in much apocalyptic fiction is on individual psychology, the
individual’s choice and will, rather than lack of reasoning. According to Day,
Romantic thinkers were equally preoccupied with “the psychological capacities of the
individual” (76). This part of the chapter will therefore discuss ethical and
psychological perspectives on suicide, in which suicide is presented as an extreme
alternative to the moral dilemmas, or sufferings, the survivors in The Road encounter
as individuals.
According to recently conducted research, the “nature of the motivation to die
by suicide is often ambivalent, transitory, and impulsive ” (Hunt et al. 31), suggesting
it is usually committed as an unplanned act, during a temporary lapse of reason.
However, when the world is on the verge of confirmed destruction, or has already
succumbed to it, life’s expectations are overshadowed by a verifiable anticipated
suffering instead of an irrational notion of it. This verifiability refutes Michael
Cholbi’s statement that “individuals may often lack a clear sense of their desires,
Van Driel 25
current or future, to be in a position to rationally determine to whether suicide
advances their interests or well-being” (82). Although, this perspective might even
place The Road’s protagonist in a position of liability by lacking a clear sense of
current and future (82), as he puts himself and his son at risk by wanting to stay alive.
The following literary examples of suicide highlight a shift in suicidal motivation in
comparison to common, actual forms of suicide. These examples indicate a sense of
despair in the individual, in the face of an actual pending doom for all humanity.
In Neville Shute’s On The Beach, the mentioned justifications for suicide are
not explored until the end of the novel, which coincides with the end of the world.
This novel is therefore able to emphasise another side of the human psyche and
demonstrates the human ability to deny endings. The Road is similar to On The Beach
in the way that it depicts the inevitability of the choice between suffering and suicide.
In On The Beach, a nuclear cloud is heading in the direction of the last people still
alive in Australia after a nuclear war on the northern hemisphere, and these people
have no chance of escaping its doom. Therefore, they do not seem to need any
justification to commit suicide, the alternative being the excruciating pain and
suffering of radiation poisoning. Again, this is a choice between suffering or
immediate death.
Aside from death by radiation poisoning, suicide is the only alternative in On
The Beach. Nearly all characters commit suicide or euthanasia. The characters do not
discuss the ethics of taking their lethal supplements—they all just accept their
medicine. “I like mine chocolate coated” (Shute 288). Suicide is the only way to take
control over their hopeless situation, and at least the pills are a means to choose where
they spent their last day on earth. The Road’s protagonist wants to, but is unable to,
save his wife from committing suicide. The woman was also prepared to kill the boy
Van Driel 26
to save him from the anticipated horrors that await them. In reference to the collective
suicide in On The Beach, and the decision of The Road’s woman, Michael Cholbi
explanation signifies the rationality and validity of such suicides:
A rationally autonomous suicide must [be] one in which an individual not only
meets both the cognitive and interest conditions, but also, on the basis of […]
adequate understanding of [the] situation, values and future, rationally chooses
to end a life that is not, on the whole, worth living any longer. (92)
In The Road, where the only prospects in life are violence and deprivation, one can
either choose to live and suffer, or to die and escape it. This is a choice that is made
on an individual level, as the plot illustrates.
The woman’s motives to commit suicide resemble the motives of euthanasia.
She says, “We’re the walking dead in a horror film” (7), claiming they are as good as
dead, and referring on the horrors in they will witness and experience in their time. Of
course, she and her family are not biologically dead, but to her, everything that will
happen from thereon will only be a “meaningless” (58) extension of life without any
quality or development, without “argument, because there is none” (59). She frees
herself of any ethical dilemma, and decides death is the way to prevent suffering.
The woman is able to commit suicide without any restrictions. Lawful
intervention or punishment are absent, because in her world, all forms of jurisdiction
have disappeared. The only social background to create a moral framework present is
her husband. Nevertheless, the last thing the man is able to say to his wife is, “I’m
begging you” (60). He feels a moral duty to keep her from killing herself, but fails to
do so eventually because of her severe determination to end her life. Despite the fact
Van Driel 27
that the man feels his wife is about to make an immoral decision, her decision appears
“clear and unambiguous” (Brook-Gordon 83).
In one of the essays of Death Rites and Rights, the autonomous “Human Right
to Die” (75) is discussed. In this essay, about an individual’s freedom of choice in
control over one’s own death, a situation as the woman’s not only can be identified as
“a right to die the least painful death available” (87), but also as a moral condition that
is validated as soon as the only other remaining option is a slow, painful and
disgraceful death. In case of the woman’s ethical dilemma, the “self-interestedly
motivation” of suicide is absent (Cholbi 66). She clearly stated that she believed that
they were “going to rape” them (McCarthy 58), but she “couldnt wait for it to
happen” (58).
The woman is the only character in the narrative who breaks with universal
morality as presented by the Husband. In presenting the wife’s suicide as a decision
that stands at odds with that of the protagonist, The Road again reveals a debt to
Kantian thought. Michael Cholbi comments that for Kant “one’s happiness could
never justify suicide […] no matter how awful or prolonged that unhappiness is” (66).
The woman wishes to commit a form of suicide by shooting herself, in fear of the
unavoidable horrors of the apocalypse: the ultimate and final transformation of the
world into something unbearable and unrecognisable; the innate ethics of the Husband
leaves him and his son to “carry the fire.”
In Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the external elements of violence and
deprivation are on the verge of being internalised by its protagonist, Robert Neville.
The world has succumbed to a bacterial infection, turning humans into vampires.
When the vampires take him eventually, he becomes infected. At the moment when
death is imminent, he knows, rebirth as a vampire will follow. He is given pills,
Van Driel 28
making his death easier to bare. Neville understands he is the only real human left and
because of that feared by this new race of beings. Consequently, he realises,
“normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just
one man” (160). By the time he realises this, he has not been the standard for the
original human species for a long time, but this new race of previously infected
human has. Ironically, this new race has also found ways to avoid being violent. For
Neville, his death just means a personal transformation, away from the suffering and
the loneliness into a sense of belonging.
While Neville is able to leave one world only to enter a new one, in The Road
transformation is impossible, as the world is no longer capable of sustaining life. The
man’s wife is unable to accept the violent horrors that will come with the new
“normalcy,” and says to the man, “You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I cant” (58).
Despite her concerns, the man does accept the future in which they will encounter the
death and violence predicted by his wife. The man pleas for his wife’s endurance, but
to no avail, “You have no argument because there is no argument” (58). The ethical
dilemma posed by the narrative: a mother willing to kill her own child to protect him,
and a father refusing to join them. However, because of this refusal, the son and the
father remain alive.
The man’s wife wanted to protect her child from the horrors women and
children are vulnerable to, and which are usually associated with war, famine, and
other forms of deprivation. She says, “Sooner or later they will catch us and they will
kill us. They will rape me. They'll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and
eat us […]” (58), predicting an outcome, which she thinks plausible with an almost
empirical conviction, and not entirely without reason, when read in light of Susan
Brownmiller’s research on violence against women: “triumph over women by rape
Van Driel 29
has become a measure of victory.” This substantiates the woman’s accuracy of her
prediction of how women are the first to become victims in times of conflict and war.
Furthermore, during these periods, “women [are] simply regrettable victims incidental , unavoidable casualties - like civilian victims of bombing, lumped together
with children” (Brownmiller). These matters are likely to have been the concerns of
the man’s wife, consequently the motive for her suicide.
The suicide of the man’s wife, reflects on the man’s social detachment. For
example, when the boy sees another child, he tries to help the group to which the
child belongs. The man is startled and is afraid of social contact with the other. He
clearly fears the people representing the new “normalcy,” as did his wife. The boy is
inconsolable and refuses to listen to his father. He is unable to experience his father’s
detachment, because he possesses no memory of the time before “the event,” and has
nothing to detach from:
“There’s no one to see. Do you want to die? Is that what you want?
I dont care, he said, sobbing. I dont care.
The man stopped. He stopped and squatted and held him. I’m sorry, he said.
Dont say that. You musnt say that.” (89)
Later, the narrative continues on the man’s behalf, by revealing that “some part of
him always wished it to be over” (163), suggesting he too appears not to be immune
to his wife’s death wish. Because the boy and the man are constantly moving, even
though food is scarcely to be found, the journey reflects the man’s refusal to die,
rather than an attempt to survive. In the world of The Road, there is nothing left to
control but one’s life.
Van Driel 30
1.4: Conclusion
This chapter has shown that The Road’s narrative depicts radicalised ethical criteria,
focalised by its protagonists, based on the use of cannibalism in relation to the
construction of its moral framework. The act of cannibalism in The Road could be
regarded as “survival cannibalism” in regard to the narrative’s setting, but its
protagonists do not make this distinction. They refer to it as a morally condemnable
act, and the act is depicted as such by The Road’s narrator. In regard to suicide, the
narrative focuses on respect for human life and fear of a violent future. In the
narrative, the motif of cannibalism is regarded from an ethical perspective, and
suicide from a more psychological perspective. Furthermore, these perspectives on
both survival cannibalism and suicide appear to be recurring motifs in Post-Romantic
apocalyptic science fiction that can be traced back to Kantian ethics.
Van Driel 31
Chapter 2: The Symbol of Fire and the Religious Propensities of Hope
in The Road
2.1: Introduction
The Road uses fire as a symbol of hope from a religious perspective, and the
protagonists’ moral framework to substantiate it. This chapter will show that The
Road’s apocalyptic narrative explores the theme of hope, and the ethical positions that
are attributed to the various characters in The Road. While doing so, it will also show
that McCarthy’s imagery is not only very similar to Romantic imagery of hope, but
that in fact similar philosophical ideas are expressed in similar figurative language.
In exploring how the father and son’s act of hope is substantiated, Kantian
theories will be used to address two ethical propensities towards the act. First of all,
the father and son’s moral framework exists to create a better chance of a future for
the boy: this addresses the practical propensities towards hope. Secondly, the symbol
of fire, as used in The Road, addresses religious propensities towards the act of hope,
which is speculative of nature. Kant regarded hope as a rational act, first of a
practical, and secondly, of a speculative tendency.
The moral framework of The Road’s protagonists is indebted to another theory
of Kant, in which the foundation of morality is based on the awareness that persons
differ from things, because persons have an intrinsic worth and dignity, beyond
physical value. In his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant
argues that “morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an
end in himself […]. Morality, and humanity as capable of it, is that which alone has
dignity” (51). By treating other people as things, in this case food, the cannibals risk
becoming things themselves and as such destroy human dignity, and with it hope for a
Van Driel 32
future regeneration of mankind.
In this distinction lies the drama of the man’s family. By denying the value of
her own life, his wife distances herself from her humanity and dignity. Nevertheless,
even the man sometimes fails to see the dignity - “He’s going to die anyway,” but
then the boy corrects him by saying: “He’s just hungry, Papa” (277). The Road clearly
explores the distinction between the moral and immoral through the concept of human
dignity and hope for the future. As the father and son continue to treat other people
guided by their innate moral framework, separating the good from the bad, the boy’s
future, significantly, remains open.
2.2: The Fire: A Secular and Religious Symbol of Hope
Hope can be projected through many symbols. One of the main symbols of hope in
The Road is fire, which is not only a biblical, but as this chapter will show also a
Romantic symbol of hope. The main characters of The Road act on hope for a future,
to be reached by carrying “the fire” (136). The father fails to answer the question on
what is to be reached. The mother, who did give an answer by describing her vision of
their future, has committed suicide. She answered by saying their future could mean
nothing but a time of anguish and misery to their family (58). The father refuses to
give in to his wife’s wish to commit suicide together. Words of the last discussion
before her death haunt the man’s dreams and thoughts. Even though, she did not live
long enough to influence the boy’s upbringing, she does so, indirectly, through the
father’s efforts to protect and take care of his son. He has chosen life, not death, and
therefore feels the obligation to fulfil his own covenant: “to take care” of the boy,
“appointed to do that by God” (80).
Fire is a common, Christian, symbol of hope and endurance. In the Bible, Jesus
Van Driel 33
is described as “the light of the world” (King James, Matthew 5: 14-16), but it also
represents the Holy Spirit (Luke 3: 17). In almost the same biblical language, the boy
undermines his father’s remark of him not being “the one who has to worry”
(McCarthy 277). He replies with “Yes I am, he said. I am the one" (277). The
suggestion of the boy being a messianic character implies the resilience of sympathy
as a universal human trait. Along the road, the boy has a tendency to help the lost and
the weary, making no distinction between their intentions. Unlike his father, who
represents the old-world generation, he believes they should be left unharmed and
unpunished; even if it means putting their survival at risk.
Besides this messianic reference, the fire remains a symbol of hope as a precept
of the man’s resilience to follow the road, leading his son to the south in the hope of a
better future. When Moses is appointed by God to lead the Jewish people to the
Promised Land, they are guided as described in the following passage. “And the Lord
went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a
pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night” (Exodus 13: 21). The fire
symbolises a guide to a better state.
In a Romantic context, in Byron’s Darkness “dying embers” represent a lack of
hope, while Percy Shelley would turn to fire as a symbol of knowledge, and a beacon
of hope, in an early sonnet:
Bright ball of flame that through the gloom of even
Silently takest thine aethereal way,
And with surpassing glory dimm'st each ray
Twinkling amid the dark blue depths of Heaven,-Unlike the fire thou bearest, soon shalt thou
Fade like a meteor in surrounding gloom,
Van Driel 34
Whilst that, unquenchable, is doomed to glow
A watch-light by the patriot's lonely tomb;
A ray of courage to the oppressed and poor;
A spark, though gleaming on the hovel’s hearth,
Which through the tyrant’s gilded domes shall roar;
A beacon in the darkness of the Earth;
A sun which, o'er the renovated scene,
Shall dart like Truth where Falsehood yet has been.
As in Shelley’s poem, the use of the symbol of fire as a projection of hope for
survival, becomes a focal point in The Road. Its effect refutes the arguments of the
man’s wife, proving the boy can be taken care of and be protected against the
immoral and bloodthirsty cannibals of the new world. The symbol remains a beacon
of hope to the father, and to the son a guide of righteousness through many ethical
dilemmas and dangers.
Despite this moral compass, the boy does not know what to hope for in the
future. To him, the question remains unanswered. The boy continues his life, carries
the fire and the burden of hope after his father’s death, and finds new “good guys”
(303). The purpose of his life is the maintenance and development of a universal set
of morals of “good” and “bad,” and by its continuation hoping to meet others who are
good, consequently surviving the savage circumstances of a destroyed world.
Curiously, the boy never wonders what the future might bring him, but only whether
there will be others that are good. Does the boy’s moral compass ensure a better
future?
This question might be found in Kant’s theories of hope. According to his
theories, hope itself can be regarded and acted upon from two ethical attitudes and
Van Driel 35
perspectives. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant theorised on a question of hope: “If
I act as I ought to do, what may I then hope? - is at once practical and theoretical. The
practical forms a clue to the answer of the theoretical, and speculative question”
(Section II). Here Kant argues that to hope for something can be a rational act, even
though the outcome is unsure at the same time. He continues that, as a rational act,
hope requires empirical grounds to trust that the desired or projected outcome of hope
is possible at all. If not, only the speculative, mostly religious, question based on
belief remains possible. From this can be deduced that, in Kant’s theory, hope,
through a perspective of universality, balances between rationality and belief.
Section 2.3 will discuss this Romantic notion of universality in more detail,
because it is particularly applicable to the idea of hope in The Road. In its story, the
planet is completely destroyed, and nothing is left to hope for in a rational sense. For
example, in reference to Kant’s “practical question,” the mother’s rational perspective
on the future placed her in an existential crisis. This crisis made her long for death,
because to her it seemed a better place than amongst the living. In respect to the
man’s disposition of responsibility towards his son, the only option to him is the
“theoretical question.”
All the following sections will take Kant’s treatise Religion within the
Boundaries of Reasons as a philosophical framework for studying the concept of
hope. In Religion, Kant states that people possess innate tendencies, for example,
towards “a natural propensity of the human being to do [good or] evil” (Part one). His
most recurring descriptions of his concept of hope in Religion are of an attitude
towards these tendencies. Kant’s perspective on human attitudes becomes evident in
his explanation of natural human “propensities,” in which people are either inclined to
be morally good or evil. Kant scholar, Vida Pavesich, explains that, according to
Van Driel 36
Kant:
such a theory of underdetermination-compensation applies to each and every
member of the human species regardless of their differences and thus has the
potential to ‘ground’ normative claims that can be made on behalf of all
human beings. (4)
Uncompromising and radical as Kant’s perspective is, The Road’s demonstrates a
similar perspective on the previously mentioned propensities. Another Romantic debt
shines through the way in which the characters are described with the same radical
tendencies towards hope, and according Pavesich it is a debt “that could chart how a
species plagued by unruly passions could realize the highest good in history in the
form of a cosmopolitan world order” (2). Here, Pavesich points at the international
and universal properties of an exploration of the ethics of hope.
2.3: The Moral Radicalisation of People’s Characters in Regard to Hope
The Road’s narrative describes a moral radicalisation of people’s characters in a postapocalyptic setting. According to Frank Kermode, “the paradigms of apocalypse
continue to lie under [the] ways of making sense of the world” (28). The setting of
The Road creates a hopeless situation for most of its characters, which in its turn
results in a radical situation of survival. The hopelessness of the setting mainly comes
from the scarcity of food and the means to produce it. The radicalisation of people’s
character is depicted through the man and boy’s division between the “good guys”
and “bad guys.” The “good guys” always do what morality desires, and the “bad
guys” do not. Of course, it is never that straightforward, but the moral compass of the
fictional characters in The Road is generally radicalised and simplified. These
Van Driel 37
generalisations and radicalisations classify the narrative as a late exercise in Kantian
metaphysics.
Much like the child voices of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789), the
boy has a radically good character. He has no memory of the “vanished world” (147),
as he was born after the apocalypse. Nearly all cultural signs posts that gave moral
directions towards the “good” have been eradicated. In this empty world, children are
born as a perpetual instead of an initial “tabula rasa,” in the Aristotelian sense,
because there is hardly anything left to write with. The only development in the boy’s
moral compass seems to be the ability to sever the “good guys” from the “bad,”
consequently proving his ability to recognise morally desirable behaviour (136).
The man tells the boy stories he remembers from the past. They are stories “of
courage and justice as he remembered them” (42). “Those stories are not true,” the
boy complains (286). He argues, “In these stories we help people, but we never help
people” (287), meaning they usually only help themselves. Even if they are not true,
these stories reflect the father’s ideals. Regarding his ideals, the man strictly keeps to
his moral code, as he does not “eat people” (304), and he will “never give up” (299).
Despite his moral fortitude, he does possess a weakness. The man has been
traumatised by many of the events since the unspecified event, and his the death of his
wife. As a result, he seems to have lost the ability to trust others. Father and son start
out being “each the other’s world entire” (6), but as the story develops, they start to
discuss their moral differences on the subject of trust. Eventually, the boy does prove
he is able to trust others, which is a quality needed for hope of a future with other
“good guys.”
The boy’s ability to trust others develops and becomes more evident with every
encounter with other survivors. These encounters are always accompanied by moral
Van Driel 38
discussions in a father-and-son dialogue, or by the inner-monologue of the father
through a limited third-person narrative. Initially, the father tries to comfort his son,
and share his own views on morality regarding survival. The father has created a
moral framework that allows the boy to continue and retain hope for survival; the boy
recognises that besides evil, there can still be good in the world.
Despite the father’s moral perspective, and his steadfastness and resilience
against his illness, he is remains afraid that “he could not enkindle in the heart of the
child what was ashes in his own” (195). The narrative frequently focuses on this
agnostic crisis, the father’s personal sense of loss of “things no longer known in the
world” and the compassion he once had (139). Unlike his father, the son shows an
altruistic character.
As the father prays for hope, the boy begs for mercy and respect for others. The
boy’s compassionate character surfaces in scenes as the one cited below:
What do you want to do?
Just help him, Papa. Just help him.
The man looked back up the road.
He was just hungry, Papa. He's going to die.
He's going to die anyway.
He's so scared, Papa. (277)
In comparison to the boy, the father more readily acts on primal and individual
emotions in terms of survival, by saying he is “scared” in the cited scene. As a result,
the father takes all of the other walker’s belongings, including his clothing, so the
man can pose no threat to him and his son.
Van Driel 39
By contrast, the boy considers not just themselves, but also others to be
survivors in need of help. On numerous occasions, the boy insists they should act
more responsibly and humane. He does this, not only on an emotional level, but also
by asking many questions, focussing on the ethical dilemmas his father’s actions
create. A poignant example of such an occasion arises when the father has a man strip
down naked in the middle of the road and hand over all his belonging, after their
provisions had been stolen.
When the boy sees the man naked, he is unable to understand his father’s
actions. He asks his father to forgive and help the man on the road, but to no avail,
because “he’s afraid to answer, papa” (278). Earlier in story, when they find a shelter
stocked with food, the boy asks, “Is it okay to take it?” (148). When they pass corpses
people who have died on the roadside, the boy asks, “What you put in your head is
there forever?,” (205). Lydia Cooper reflects on these questions, by commenting that
they “address complicated issues of responsibility toward others and the practical
application of compassion in a morally rancid world. The sheer number of these
dialogues […] suggests their importance” (231).
The differences between the father and son are of a complementary nature,
which allows the son to become the father’s moral compass. The result is that their
bond grows deeper, and the boy becomes his father’s moral guide. In the scene cited
above, the development becomes evident. Cooper explains that “the father responds to
the son’s spontaneous demonstration of compassion with the argument that their
treatment of the thief is just, if not merciful, and that in any event, the boy is ‘not the
one’ who needs to worry” (232). She also points out that
The boy replies, ‘Yes I am....I am the one’ (218). And so the boy makes his
Van Driel 40
most compelling argument about ethics: if, indeed, he is his father’s and the
world’s [symbol] of hope for human survival, then that hope is nothing less
than a radical commitment to mercy in a world where an act of mercy just may
be a death sentence. What is at stake is nothing less than the divine in human
nature. (232)
After this scene, the father continues to believe the boy is “the one,” projecting on his
son a sort of messianic heir who will “carry the fire” of humanity to the future.
The man has only indirectly carried “the fire,” by taking care of his son. His son
is the only one able to continue to carry the fire and find hope in a world where there
seems none possible. That is why, after the man’s death, his son makes a promise as
token of this continuation: “He [knelt] beside his father. He was wrapped in a blanket
as the man had promised and the boy didn't uncover [him.] I’ll talk to you every day,
he whispered. And I wont forget. No matter what” (306).
2.4: The Road’s Tendency Towards the Theoretical Question of What to Hope
Judging purely on The Road’s setting, an individual’s hope for any future survival
would be inconceivable. Despite this hopelessness, the father-son relationship grows
stronger, and the man does not act by virtue of hope of his own, but for his son’s
complete integrity and the continuation of his life. “My job is to take care of you. I
was appointed to do that by God”(77). Erik Wielenberg argues that the man can only
find hope beyond rationality, saying that “at times he tries to convince the child, and
possibly himself, that God is still at work in the world” (2). By doing so, the man
elevates his motives to a religious level. Again, in respect to the man’s sense of
responsibility towards his son, the only option for him is finding an answer to
Van Driel 41
“theoretical question” of Kant’s theories on hope: a belief in a future through religious
attributes.
The man’s spiritual motivation adds a religious perspective to The Road’s
narrative, which, in light of the implied fragility of humankind’s existence, can be
found in symbolism of “the fire” (298). At the brink of death, the man says to the boy,
“It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it” (298). To the man, the fire is real,
and the boy is handed the responsibility to carry it.
Throughout the novel, the man tries to teach and tell his son about the old-world
traditions, but is not very successful in educating these morals and codes of conduct.
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes his concept of the perfect moral world. It
is a world much like William Godwin’s utopia (if differently conceived), in which
freedom and moral law are perfectly balanced, and everyone does his moral duty. The
actual possibility of such a world is a condition, just as The Road’s world, in a
fictional form. The world of The Road is the exact opposite of Kant’s proposed ideal
moral world, as it lacks the context, the people and the objectives to attain it.
The actual likelihood of such a world in which everyone ought always to will
the moral law, is indeed a utopia. From his universal perspective, to paraphrase
Kant’s Critique (section II), when we will the moral law, we implicitly accept that a
moral world is really possible. The people in The Road cannot hope for a fully moral
world anymore, but they can still hope for a society of “good guys” (196), even if it
is a small one. In doing so, The Road’s protagonists are taking a Kantian perspective;
for as Kant argued:
just as the moral principles are necessary according to reason in its practical
use, so it is equally necessary according to reason in its theoretical use to
Van Driel 42
assume that everyone has ground to hope for happiness in the measure in
which he has made himself worthy of it in his conduct, and that therefore the
system of morality is inseparably (though only in the idea of pure reason)
connected with that of happiness. (Critique on Pure Reason, Section II)
Here, Kant assumes that everyone has reasons to hope for happiness relative to their
own integrity. Furthermore, it can be deduced that, according to Kant, people assume
such a connection is actually possible in relation to their own behaviour. Kant has
designated this as an “objective practical reality” (Religion, “The End of All Things”).
Kant continues with his radical claim, that God’s actual existence, as well as that of
the future life for the human soul, are necessary conditions of the real possibility of
such a necessary connection. Nevertheless, Andrew Chignell explains that Kant’s
theories in the Critique on Pure Reason end with the idea that “religion is not
primarily concerned with belief (Glaube) but rather with hope (Hoffnung)” (1).
In The Road the man whispers, convinced he is coughing his last, “Are you
there? Will I see you at last?” (10). By this, the man professes he is in crisis in
relation to his belief in God and a future life. According to Kant, man “willingly takes
upon himself, as so many opportunities to test and exercise his disposition for the
good, all the ills and sufferings that befall him.” The protagonist in The Road invests
his “good” in the boy by saying, “If he is not the word of God never spoke” (3), and
from then on protects and regards his son as though he was the son of God himself.
This is what the narrative’s perspective suggests in regard to the man’s hope in a
future. It is projected through his son, in a more religious than rational sense.
Despite his father’s religious crisis, the boy’s developing inclination towards
the “theoretical” in the Kantian sense, becomes especially present at times of good
Van Driel 43
fortune. For example, at a certain point, they unexpectedly find a bomb shelter full of
provisions. They celebrate their newly-found abundance of food and drink with a
sense of humility. The boy suddenly feels obliged to thank the people who had
originally stocked the bunker, so his father lets him. Initially hesitant the boys thanks
the previous owners and says,
Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it
for yourself and if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we
were and we’re sorry that you didnt get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe
in heaven with God.” (154)
The boy’s moral perspectives are obvious by saying, “we’re sorry that you didnt get
to eat it,” but what is equally significant is the form of his thankfulness. He speaks to
the “people” who stacked the provisions and unintentionally left it to be found. He is
in fact prays for them, hoping they are in a better place. While doing this, he also
mentions God, and even though he does not directly address him, at least it shows
evidence of the boy’s metaphysical appeal to a future time or place beyond theirs. The
boy pursues his moral tendencies, but is clearly also able to give a voice to his
metaphysical desires.
The boy’s metaphysical desires are substantiated by his father, who wants to
prepare the boy for a future without him. The man knows he will die of his illness, as
he helps his son prepare for a time without him. Instead of teaching him to survive in
a practical way only, the man teaches his son how to pray, again reaching for the
transcendental side of survival:
Van Driel 44
You can talk to me and I'll talk to you. You'll see
Will I hear you?
You will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you'll hear me.
You have to practice. Just don't give up. (278-79)
This appeal to transcendence beyond the present in regard to the man and boy
returns throughout the narrative until the very end of the novel. After his father’s
death, the people on the beach welcome the boy. When the boy says he does not talk
to God but to his father, the woman says, “that the breath of God was his breath yet
though it pass from man to man through all of time” (304), emphasising the religious
perspective on a beginning of a new time. In the context of the religious overtones in
the narrative, an intertextual reference is evident: “And [God] formed man of the dust
of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 8:27).
This intertextuality and universality is supported by Thomas Schaub, who
argues that “[the] novel brings into virtual identity the belief in God and God’s
existence within each man” (10). Identifying the applied universality of belief, Schaub
also discusses the concept of hope through religion and describes that
The mother in the family talks to him about God. But the boy has promised his
father that he will talk to him every day. “He tried to talk to God but the best
thing he could do was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t
forget. The woman [on the beach] said that was all right. She said that the
breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all
of time” (286). Here the father’s evocation of the forms, his construction of
meaning from the inside, is given affirmation not only by the [woman’s]
Van Driel 45
belief, but also by her use of the word “breath” to connect eternity with time.
(10)
Overshadowed by his parent’s old world values, the ending and the new beginning are
indivisibly connected in The Road through the boy. It is the end of the man’s world
leading to the possibility of a new one.
2.5: Conclusion
This chapter has shown that, in The Road, the protagonists’ moral framework
substantiates fire as a symbol of hope from a religious perspective. It has also shown
how the father’s knowledge of the old world makes him a conduit for the fire of
knowledge in the education of his son, assuring a better chance of survival for the
boy, and the boy’s future. By briefly comparing McCarthy’s imagery to Shelley’s
Romantic imagery, and, more importantly, comparing the protagonists’ moral
framework of hope to Kant’s distinction between the theoretical and practical
propensities towards the act of hope, this chapter has also shown how Romantic
philosophical ideas and ethical positions are expressed in similar figurative language
in texts produced at different historical moments and within different cultural
contexts.
Van Driel 46
Chapter 3: Romantic Perspectives on a Post-Apocalyptic Road Narrative
3.1: Introduction
In The Road, McCarthy has rearranged the characteristic end-of-the-world scenario of
most post-apocalyptic narratives by setting the entire narrative past the actual
apocalyptic event. Consequently, the entire narrative is dedicated to the protagonists’
consciousness and moral framework. This focus creates an opportunity for a critical
analysis of the novel’s ethics and also allows for a comparative analysis of these
motifs to their Romantic and science-fiction equivalents, which will reveal how
similar Romantic motifs and themes are substantiated through the narrative voice and
plot of post-war apocalyptic science fictions.
3.2: The Post-Apocalyptic Narrative Shift
Generally speaking, as Day and others have pointed out, Romanticism signified a
shift from faith in reason to the senses and imagination as vehicles for discovering
universal (moral) truths, and a turn to an interest in Nature, and the soul, in relation to
an individual’s imagination and consciousness. This interest in the relationship
between human consciousness, the imagination and the surrounding world is one of
science fiction’s most overt Romantic debts and it is often the main focus of the
subgenre of apocalyptic fiction. This section will show that The Road’s radical
minimisation of the surrounding cultural and natural world constitutes a focus on
human psychology, imagination and intellectual entropy.
In support of this notion, J. G. Ballard wrote that science fiction “was a
visionary engine that created a new future with every revolution [propelled] by an
exotic literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the surrealists” (189).
Van Driel 47
Ballard believed that “psychological space, what I termed ‘inner space’, was where
science fiction should be heading” (192). This “inner space” is in essence a Romantic
notion and The Road reveals its Romantic-SF heritage by including in its narrative a
shift towards the “inner space.”
Contrary to apocalyptic narratives such as Wells’ scientific romances, or John
Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), which are set just before, during, and
immediately after the apocalyptic event, the apocalyptic event in The Road has been
removed from its plot almost entirely. The narrative focuses mainly on what Ballard
called the “psychological space,” or what Poe famously called the realm “out of
space, out of time.” In this sense, The Road has become the ultimate post-Romantic,
post-apocalyptic narrative. To contextualise this narrative shift in apocalyptic fiction,
I will briefly discuss a number of relevant titles.
Even though Ballard had his own convictions on the development of
apocalyptic narratives, his The Drowned World (1962) still recounts the survival of
the earth’s natural environment, witnessed by the last people on earth. In doing so it
follows Shelley’s blueprint novel The Last Man (1826), in which the earth’s natural
environment still plays an important role in the development of human psyche, even
though the human species ultimately become extinct due to a global pandemic.
Most people in both narratives are unable to stay alive under conditions caused
by natural phenomena like pandemics. In The Drowned World, a select group of
people who do survive a natural phenomenon best described as “solar changes,” are
the ones who were able to biologically or genetically adapt to the new natural
circumstances. At least in Ballard’s novel, the planet’s environment will stabilise and
return to a new kind of equilibrium, but humanity undergoes a form of entropy.
The narratives in question relate to the end of the reign of mankind on the
Van Driel 48
natural world, essentially describing an environmental reset. The living planet
continues, and the human race becomes extinct, or repopulates in smaller numbers,
but only on nature’s terms.
Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) and Shute’s On The Beach (1957)
are also based on the recognisable blueprint of apocalyptic narratives. These novels
follow the plot of man-made apocalypses. Nevertheless, in these narratives, the
human population is destroyed or at least drastically reduced. Unlike The Road,
people are most likely to survive in the world of The Day of the Triffids. Its natural
resources will stay intact or recover, and will probably become available to humans
again. Chances of survival are higher for the ones who are lucky enough to find a safe
place to hide from the Triffids, and patient enough to wait for the extinction of these
genetically altered, flesh-eating plants roving the countryside. The planet survives,
and a future remains for the human race.
Closer to the hopelessness and grimness of The Road are Brian Aldiss’
Greybeard and P.D. James’s The Children of Men. These novels are examples of a
variation on the previous theme in apocalyptic fiction, in which, in their case, the
human race becomes aware of its incapability to reproduce due to a poisoned ecosystem. Especially in the case of Greybeard, the human population remains, but it is
limited in numbers. Except for a small group of genetically healthy young people,
most of them are over eighty-years old and childless. Nevertheless, a glimmer of hope
remains in both novels, because not everyone seems to be suffering the same fate of
sterility, and the world’s natural environment is able to the renew itself, as the
following passage from Greybeard reveals: “The Earth renewed itself; only men grew
older and were not replenished. The trees grew taller, the rookeries noisier, the
graveyards fuller, the streets more silent” (350).
Van Driel 49
Indicated by the previous passage, Aldiss’ style often resembles the style of the
man’s memories and his descriptions of the landscapes of the past world in The Road.
Nevertheless, in Greybeard, the post-apocalyptic landscape is depicted as a green,
fertile world. As Greybeard’s natural world survives, being largely unpopulated,
competition for natural resources is practically absent. Signifying intellectual entropy,
human life is simplified and possible forms of civilisation have regressed to a
primitive hunter-gatherer society. The possibility to move beyond survival gives the
narrative an opportunity to focus on the moral and social development of humans.
Except for The Road, in most of the other narratives mentioned, people have the
possibility to continue or reintroduce their previous conduct and way of life, similar to
the examples of Greybeard. As only the means, and not the ends, have been limited
for the characters, these narratives provide hope and keep possibilities open for
renewal of human kind as well. These means and ends are almost inverted in The
Road, in which there are still too many people looking to consume – the last tins of
food, or other humans – but hardly anything is left to consume. The following passage
from the novel bares evidence of these conditions:
The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the streets caked with ash,
everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A
corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. (McCarthy 11)
The Road denies the reader any moments of renewal or catharsis, as in most
narratives of apocalyptic fiction. Ashley Kunsa argues that
What we have in the novel’s style is the post-apocalyptic language of a
Van Driel 50
simultaneously new and age-old work: a means of looking forward, to after,
by seeking the basic forms again. The paradoxical achievement of McCarthy’s
novel is that it accepts the disjunction between where the world/fiction has
been and where it is going, and in this moment of possibility — after the old
and before the new — reconciles barbarous destruction with eloquent hope.
(69)
Through The Road’s consideration of time and writing, McCarthy situates the last
people on earth within an apocalyptic present and an undetermined future,
contemplating the nature of their own end-time, as well. As its world becomes
increasingly void of life and resources, people’s choices become fewer and simpler,
but morally and socially more significant. The intensity of the narrative describing
human behaviour can only be experienced in a setting of ultimate destruction, like the
one depicted in The Road.
3.3: A Road-Narrative: Place, Time and a Romantic Perspective
The Road’s narrative depicts contrasting yet related opposites: it is the story of man
against the elements, good versus evil, a matter of life or death, and the external and
internal space of the minds of man. These are all Romantic motifs, and the Romantic
perspective of the novel is enhanced by the way that inner and outer space are
contrasted. The story contains utopian as well as dystopian elements. The natural
physical world, external space, constitutes a strong dystopian element, while the
psychological inner life of the characters, constitutes a utopian element. The narrative
achieves a dynamic effect in style between the man’s pastoral memories of the past,
the ruthless conditions of his present, and the factual and pared-down style of the
Van Driel 51
conversations. All these elements, invoke The Road’s Romanticism, best described by
Eldridge’s definition of key tropes of literary Romanticism: “imagination, natureplace, or prophetic ordinary language” (2).
Regarding language, The Road lacks conventional punctuation and lengthy
sentences, the narrative contains a powerful simplicity. An example of this can be
found in the following scene, when after having escaped a house filled with people
stocked as cattle to be eaten by the residing cannibals, the man and boy take a
moment to rest. The boy wonders,
They’re going to kill those people, arent they?
Yes.
Why do they have to do that?
I dont know.
Are they going to eat them?
I dont know.
They’re going to eat them, arent they?
Yes.
And we couldnt help them because then they’d eat us too.
Yes.
And that’s why we couldn’t help them.
Yes.
Okay. (134-135)
This powerful simplicity of diction and simple syntax is not unusual to McCarthy. He
used a similar style in Blood Meridian (1985) and No Country for Old Men
Van Driel 52
(2005). The Road is narrated in a third-person, generally omniscient perspective, but
often limited to witness the father’s chronic internal despair. Indeed, complete
paragraphs describe his thoughts, memories, and perceptions. These three elements
are present in the next passage:
He slept little and he slept poorly. He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood
where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but
he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds. Lying there
in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard
fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough the world at last
would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it
slowing fading from memory. (17)
Here, the narrative describes the man’s perception of waking up from a beautiful
dream, full of images from his past, into his nightmarish reality, which is on the brink
of erasing any natural proof of the old world, now only alive in his dreams.
This nightmarish reality is mostly described from an omniscient perspective,
especially when describing an event experienced by both father and son:
He woke in the darkness to hear something coming. He lay with his hands at
either side of him. The ground was trembling. It was coming toward them.
[…] It neared, growing louder. Everything trembling. Then it passed beneath
them like an underground train and drew away into the night and was gone.
(27)
Van Driel 53
This passage shows evidence of a dying world through a shared experience of father
and son, in a factual narrative style from an omniscient perspective. When the
narrative shifts from omniscient to a limited perspective, it usually focuses on the
man’s moral compass and emotions for his son:
There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep, that he would begin to
sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about
but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no
longer any way to think about at all. (137)
The narrative describes many thoughts like these on how the father tries to honour the
family values he believed in once, feeling remorse when he is not always able to do
so.
The Road essentially combines a typical road-movie plot with a tale of
apocalyptic fiction. Its plot focuses on the father-son relationship and their subsequent
ethical dilemmas and survival situations. For the most part, their relationship is what
has them continue traversing through the post-apocalyptic world of The Road.
Important elements of road-movies are the movement on the road itself, but also a
focus on the relationships of its travellers.
These road-narratives construct a moral framework between their protagonists.
The passing landscape influences their thoughts and emotions, which again is a
Romantic convention developed by Wordsworth specifically, in poems such as
“Tintern Abbey,” and the later epic travel poem The Excursion: nature’s influence on
people’s sentiment. The plot strongly relies on the transformation of the protagonists’
relationships, a transformation not in the least caused by the experiences of their
Van Driel 54
travels. Modern road-movies like Thelma and Louise (1991) or Paris, Texas (1984)
fall under this category. Recognisably for these road-movies, “are [the] constant
struggles for the various characters’ positions, in relation to each other as well as to
the world at large. Nevertheless, bonding and mutual understanding start and end in
one space, the road, sometimes originating in a purely pragmatic or even forced
relationship” (Pühringer 6). In 2009, The Road was adapted into a movie with Viggo
Mørtensen playing the father. A precise transcription of the novel for the screenplay
resulted in a road-movie script, highlighting the relationship element even more.
While focussing on the tenderness of the depicted relationship, McCarthy does
not refrain from addressing the horrid atrocities of survival and moral decline: naked
tramps without food, people kept in a cellar like livestock, skulls on spikes and babies
roasted on a spit. The immorality and horror in The Road pose a strong contrast to the
tenderness and care of the father-son relationship. Despite this contrast, McCarthy
employs a rather factual style to describe the moments between the man and the boy,
reflecting the strength and intensity of their relationship.
The following passage illustrates McCarthy’s factual writing style: “[The man]
thought they had enough food to get through the mountains but there was no way to
tell. The pass at the watershed was five thousand feet and it was going to be very
cold” (25). According to Kunsa – commenting on the same passage:
Here, place is calculated by the characters and related to the reader in terms of
food and warmth. Descriptions such as this one convey information of vital
importance to the characters on their journey, information that helps them to
get their bearings and ultimately to survive. (63)
Van Driel 55
An example of McCarthy’s lyrical style of writing can be found in the following
passage:
He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for
balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their
reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by
a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting
them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something
nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common
satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day
movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet
know it must. (14)
This an example of a passage displaying a sense of the Wordsworthian sublime,
focussing on human consciousness and awareness of existence. Its mix of archaic
diction, odd syntax and spiritualisation of the human faculties and laws of physics,
that expresses a reverence to nature and the universe similar to Romanticism.
3.4: Conclusion
This chapter has shown how the entire narrative is dedicated to the protagonists’
consciousness and moral framework, and compared these motifs to their Romantic
equivalents, but also how similar Romantic motifs and themes are substantiated
through the narrative voice and plot of post-war apocalyptic (science) fictions.
Keeping the backstory of the protagonists limited substantiates a focus of The Road’s
narrative on the protagonists’ consciousness in their present situation. A few
Van Driel 56
flashbacks to the past are meant to illustrate the man’s situation during the time of the
boy’s birth and to mark a starting point for the novel’s apocalyptic world. In an
allegorical sense, the main characters exist only as types, as Blasi notes: “McCarthy’s
text is concerned neither with the concrete realism underlying the external causes of
an apocalyptic event nor with the effects that such an event would have on human and
non-human life. Rather, the narrator utilises the apocalyptic mode as an allegory of
epochal change” (92). In approaching The Road as a narrative of human
transformation, heralding the end for human kind, or a new beginning, Blasi lends
support to a reading of The Road as a modern novel with the potential to be read as a
Romantic allegory.
Van Driel 57
Chapter 4: Man Against Nature: Allegorical Mode and Elements in The Road
4.1: Introduction
This chapter will focus on The Road’s allegorical mode and elements. To
identify the allegorical characteristics, this chapter will compare the narrative to two
types of allegory. As a precursor to The Road’s themes of “pilgrimage and restless
wandering” (Hillier 53), John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) will be
compared to The Road. With similar intent, this chapter will also address the “Cave
Allegory” from Plato’s The Republic (380 BC). Finally, as The Road’s narrative
expresses sentiments concerning the human condition at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, this chapter ends with an analysis of its important reference to zombiehorror films: “We are the walking dead in a horror film” (7). The allegorical nature of
the zombie apocalypse, so popular today, has its roots in Romantic uses of allegory.
4.2: Allegorical Interpretation
Allegorical writings and interpretations of literature dominated the literate world until
the end of the Renaissance, as predominantly Christian philosophers and scholars
studied classical literature for allegorical meanings. In their article “Honeymoon and
Pilgrimages,” Todd Oakley and Peter Crisp put these texts into a historical
perspective:
There are many successful later allegorical texts, like George Orwell’s
dystopian beast fable, Animal Farm (1945) and Thomas Pynchon’s postmodernist pageant, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), [allegories] in the prototypical
generic sense, largely disappeared by the late 17th century. (156)
Van Driel 58
An example of this “prototypical” medieval allegory is the fifteenth-century English
morality play Everyman (1508). This play employs personifications. In his article
“Allegory and Symbol,” on the status and acceptance of allegory in modern literature,
Crisp explains some of the conventions of prototypical allegory and personifications:
Personifications are devices allowing one to refer not to an expression’s
primary referent but to some entity associated with that referent. In the case of
abstract personification the pragmatic connector is metaphorical, the primary
referent an abstract entity and the entity actually referred to a person in the
allegory’s fictional, story world. (326)
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress not only employs direct personifications, but
also “pragmatic connectors” of places and buildings on the protagonist’s journey.
Therefore, Bunyan’s text can only be interpreted allegorically, as a seventeenthcentury parable of Christian life.
Allegorical interpretation as an approach to reading and understanding literature
prevails today as a way of interpreting a written work that openly invites a figurative
next to a literal reading of the text. For example, in case of The Pilgrim’s Progress,
the manner of interpretation is obvious, even guided, by its evident use of
personifications and moral labelling. The protagonist, Christian, meets characters
such as “Worldly Wiseman” (18) and “Hopeful” (94), and travels from the “City of
Destruction” (Bunyan 17) towards the “Celestial City” (104), through places as
“Doubting Castle” (104) and “Vanity-Fair” (120). According to the conventions of
prototypical allegory, given by Crisp, these characters and places are depicted as
Van Driel 59
personifications and labels of moral behaviour, or other concepts within a Christian
context.
Narratives like The Pilgrim’s Progress were constructed according to Christian
traditions and contained broad as well as close intertextual reference to the Scriptures.
Bunyan’s narrative belonged “to one of its most important sub-genres, Prudentian
allegory” (157), according to Oakley and Crisp. They state that in this category of the
genre, a story like The Pilgrim Progress signified an allegory of the Christian
everyman. This is not unlike how modern apocalyptic fiction portrays the
contemporary, secular everyman. The most important difference is that modern postapocalyptic literature, open to allegorical interpretation, does not necessarily have the
same spiritual meaning.
In establishing the possibility of allegorical interpretation, Oakley and Crisp’s
critical comparison of The Pilgrims Progress and a modern variant of allegory can be
used. In their article, they interpret the plot in a contemporary Christian context:
The presentation space of The Pilgrim’s Progress is based on the scenario of a
man leaving his wife and children and travelling across the countryside to
another city. In the reference space, what the man corresponds to is the
Calvinist elect; the city he leaves corresponds to the state of prospective
damnation; his journey across the English countryside, to the Christian life in
this world; the city he arrives at, to heaven. (158)
In reference to this contextual discussion, The Road’s “presentation space” is based
on the plot of the protagonist, who travels to the south with his son, in search for the
coast. In The Road’s reference space, what the man arguably corresponds to is the
Van Driel 60
inconsequent use of old-world morals of “the good” (302) in a dying natural world
without religious salvation; they travel the road towards the south coast to “the state
of prospective” oblivion of humankind. Their journey across the countryside leads the
son to a temporary foster family, possibly with surviving under the same moral intent,
but it is nothing more than a postponed ending. The boy will be able to live as long as
possible, but just for the time being, because McCarthy’s narrative suggests no
assured future nor a deus ex machina.
The Road’s plot structure and characterisation bare evidence of McCarthy’s
shift from his previous “Southern Gothic” mode to an allegorical narrative.
Significantly, it is The Road’s allegorical potential that once again recall many of the
literary characteristics the novel shares with Romanticism. As Adam Mars-Jones
pointed out, The Road is “a thought and feeling experiment, bleak, exhilarating (in
fact, endurable) only because of its integrity, its wholeness of seeing.” This
“wholeness of seeing” creates a more vast, more intricate, structure and sense of
otherness than traditional allegorical fables, prophesies and SF what-if stories do.
4.3: Allegorical Conventions in The Road
The earlier mentioned lifelessness of The Road’s world, the polarised aspects of the
goodness of the father-son relationship against the rest of the world, and the themes of
violence and death in the form of the bloodcults and the suicide of the mother figure,
provide enough vehicles in an allegorical interpretation. In his research on
McCarthy’s use of prototypes in his novels, Georg Guillemin states that earlier works
containing his form of allegorical narrative were not always met with popular
demand:
Van Driel 61
The uneasy reception with which McCarthy’s writings have occasionally been
met may be due not so much to the author’s penchant for violence
notwithstanding action, but [his] symbolism, [which] works allegorically at a
time when allegories have just begun to regain respect as a literary mode. Its
semantic single-mindedness renders allegory alien to the romantic, realist, or
modernist school of literature. (10)
Guillemin over generalizes when he names Romanticism, realism and modernism as
single-minded in their rejection of allegory. McCarthy in fact addresses one aspect of
the “romantic school of literature” directly through his allegory. The Road’s narrative
depicts the sublime in nature through many references to the landscapes of a lost
world. “By omitting the names of the pre-apocalyptic world” McCarthy “allows the
ruined places (and the ruined civilization of which they were a part) to be left in the
past” (Kunsa 64). Not unlike the ruined statue in Shelley’s “Ozymadias,” the ruins of
a lost empire come to represent a universal trait of human civilization, substantiating
the Romantic aspect of The Road’s narrative. The images of the “pre-apocalyptic
world” remain part of the melancholy make-up of the father, which is strengthened by
the present petrification of the landscape in the novel, that echoes Shelley’s lyric:
“Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level
sands stretch far away” (Shelley ll. 12-14).
According to Brenda Machosky, “the symbol is the expression of hope; allegory
is the expression of mourning” (166). In The Road, the fire symbolizes Hope. The
expression of mourning is most vivid in the man’s dreams. At the start of the novel,
before the man wakes up besides his son, the narrator describes an almost platonic
concept of reality, of a dream in cave:
Van Driel 62
Their light okaying over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable
swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep
stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the
minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without
ease. (1)
The man’s fear of what the world has come to is substantiated at the end of his dream
by a translucent creature walking “into the dark” (2). The Road begins with a dream,
but this dream does not function as a framing device in the way that it does in The
Pilgrim’s Progress. Nevertheless, the dream establishes the nightmarish plot
immediately, and both father and son are “like pilgrims in a fable” (1). This holds true
for the narrative’s plot as their “pilgrim’s progress” substantiates the story.
Nevertheless, the darkness-bound creature from the man’s dream could signify
mankind returning to a metaphorical darkness, in the way that it had done in Byron’s
semi-allegorical Darkness:
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge-The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
Van Driel 63
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the Universe. (73-83)
It is a poem that depicts how the natural world transforms from existence to a
metaphorical darkness of non-existence; mankind’s creations are the first to “rot” and
disappear, and humanity and the natural world follow.
4.4: Return to the Cave: Plato Revisited
In Book IV of The Republic, Plato depicted his famous “Allegory of the Cave.” The
allegory was meant to describe the enlightenment of the human soul through the
various stages of development in life and the importance of knowledge to understand
the difference between the conceptual and actual world. The Road’s narrative seems
to represent a reversal of this metaphor. The Road’s invokes both Bunyan’s and
Plato’s allegories on the first two pages, inviting this interpretation. From the moment
the father wakes up until he dies, the similarity to an allegorical journey like Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress – but then in Byron’s apocalyptic setting – are underlined by the
father’s memories of his dreams and nightmares, beginning with a dream of a
recognisably similar cave.
The narrator’s allusions to Plato’s allegory could possibly signify mankind’s
transition from existence to oblivion. Carole Juge interprets the behaviour of the
creature in Plato’s cave as “[unable to] bear the vision of truth,” and therefore it
”decides to go back to darkness, i.e. the Cave and its shackles” (20). In The Road, the
transparency of the creature reveals its “bowels, a beating heart,” and “brain” (2), the
organs of the human body traditionally associated with nourishment, emotion and
intellect. As the creature “stared into the light” (2), it stared into the light of
Van Driel 64
knowledge and moral good, which refers to Plato’s “Simile of the Sun.” Juge states
that “Plato uses the Sun as the visual image for the intelligible, non-visual Good”
(17). The Road’s narrator grimly describes the slowly diminishing light in its world,
its people turning to evil ways of cannibalism, violence and ignorance, in a darkening
setting. “Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day
the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp” (32), again
signifying a sense mourning. According to Chris Danta, the light of the sun is also a
metaphor for a sense of human enlightenment disappearing:
From the first page we learn that light and truth are fading. We learn that the
world of The Road lacks not only valid human perception but, even more
disturbingly, the greater truth that makes it possible. With the loss of proper
access to the sun comes the loss of the concepts we derive metaphorically
from the sun. (156–57)
One of these lost “concepts we derive metaphorically from the sun” is hope, which is
also fading in the world of The Road. The invisible sun is metaphorically described as
“a grieving mother with a lamp” (28), hopelessly searching one of her children lost in
the upcoming darkness: the living earth. Despite this, the father’s hope for a future
persists through his son. The father can see there is a future for his son, when he says,
“It’s inside you” (298), a few hours before he dies on the southern shore, where his
son meets “good” people (302). A few instances before the father’s death, the
narrative’s allegorical mode returns to its similarity with Plato’s metaphor:
He woke in the darkness, coughing softly. He lay listening. Drip of water. A
Van Driel 65
fading light. Old dreams encroached upon the waking world. The dripping was
in the cave. The light was a candle which the boy bore in a ringstick of beaten
copper. The wax spattered on the stones. Tracks of unknown creatures in the
mortified loess. In that cold corridor they had reached the point of no return
which was measured from the first solely by the light they carried with them.
(299–300)
Hardly any word can be left out citing this passage, as they all describe the father’s
dreamlike perceptions of his final moments in allusion to Plato’s Cave allegory.
Despite this, the father’s perception of the metaphorical light appears to be nothing
more than his son’s candle in a ringstick (299). Referring to the narrative shift
discussed in Chapter 3, McCarthy has employed an external narrative, in this case one
of a metaphysical nature, just to end with a direct description instead of a metaphor of
light. However, the “corridor” where the father and son have landed, could still be
part of the Cave allegory, but the “point of no return” introduces a literary shift to an
ecocritical interpretation.
“The grieving mother” metaphor of the sun already hinted towards a dying
world. Emily Lane compares The Road’s dystopia to Dante’s Inferno, which also
represented the worst fears in Dante’s time. In contemporary reference to The Road,
she claims that “the mystical dreams that laments the destruction of the natural world
at the hand of humans lends a more vital significance to the man’s and boy’s role as
bearers of truth” and how “humans deserve the blame for the apocalypse in their
arrogant effort to control the natural world” (15) in the present.
Even though the religious connotation of “the fire” and “the light” is present in
the narrative, hope and other concepts of life are interpreted through a different
Van Driel 66
allegorical interpretation. The setting of The Road’s allegorical allusions avoid
absolution, because the only times “[the] language of redemption is exposed, [it is]
not in order to reveal its violence or to claim its fulfilment, but as a remnant of an
irrecoverable world” (101). It is a human ending, probably caused by humans, and
“the question is not who will save the world but, instead, who will witness its
shattering?” (101). Shelley Rambo explains how The Road’s concepts of hope and
religion do not lead to redemption in The Road. The remaining humans can do
nothing more than witness the end of the world with the same inability to act as
people who witnessed the big disasters and other horrid events of the last decades,
similar to the attacks on the World Trade Center and its aftermath.
The Road’s narrative mode is allegorical through the concept that humankind’s
metaphysical limitations allow them to witness the passage of time and the world they
live in to the extent of their sensory and conceptual limitations. The man dreams of
the world as it was, “so rich in color” (20), and as it is, even though his sleep becomes
more and more “dreamless” (268), and his old-world memories few. A consequential
idea indebted to Romantic thinking: nature has died, therefore human imagination has
died with it. An eco-critical reading of the text and its metaphors reveals that its
language is allegorical to all the described appearances of nature in the novel, and
humankind is only a part of this natural world until the end of it. The only element
and character in The Road defying this idea is the mother, which will be discussed in
the following section.
4.5: Horror Movies: Allegorising Trauma and the Human Condition
“We’re the walking dead in a horror film” (7), the mother says in The Road. She
committed suicide to avoid being witness to the end of the world and the hardship it
Van Driel 67
would cause her and her family. She believed their lives were over from the moment
“the clocks stopped at 1:17” (54). In reaction to the mother’s “walking dead”
reference, Cooper states that the mother’s “reference to American pulp apocalyptic
films suggests a correlation between the futuristic world of the novel and the fears of
the current day” (222). The origin of this correlation and “the fears of the current day”
might lie in the exposure to many of the present-day images and films of war and
destruction, and the increasing popularity of the horror genre, including the postapocalyptic. The media report through a constant stream of images in newspapers, the
internet, cinema and television; fiction or non-fiction.
As early as the Romantic period, Percy Shelley turned to overt allegory in
chronicling a traumatic event in British history, “The Mask of Anarchy.” His poem
was inspired by the 1889 “Peterloo Massacre” in Manchester. Shelley was already
famous for his complicated metaphors and references, but in “The Mask of Anarchy”
he omits the use of complex literary devices and presents more recognisable imagery
and allusions to “produce more immediate effects upon a less educated audience”
(Reiman and Fraistat 315).
Shelley’s poem is rife with personifications, prompting an allegorical
interpretation of the poem, which becomes evident with the following example from
the poem:
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse; (30-34)
Van Driel 68
Most of Shelley’s contemporaries would recognize the allusion to Revelations with
Anarchy representing “Death in the Apocalypse,” at the same time demonstrating its
use of apocalyptic figurative language.
Steven Spielberg’s version of The War of the Worlds (2005), Cloverfield (2008),
and Perfect Sense (2011) are examples of modern-day apocalyptic films which follow
in the Shelley tradition by tapping into various sentiments of the experience of
traumatic events, just as many people did after the attacks on the World Trade Center
in 2001. All these movies present a perspective of first-hand witnessing of mass
destruction, loss of a moral compass, the vulnerability to larger-than-life situations of
war and destruction, and of death. The related sense of mourning as discussed in the
previous section, is a logical effect, and signifies a change in people’s psychological
make-up after an event such as the terrorist attacks of 2001. Kristiaan Versluijs
identifies such an event as “a limit event, an event so traumatic that it shatters the
symbolic resources of the individual and escapes the normal processes of meaningmaking and cognition” (980). Cooper adds to this that “The Road participates
thematically in the projects of contemporary popular responses to 9/11, exploring as it
does attributes of communal guilt, terror, and what, if anything, humanity can find
that may provide a way out of the darkness” (222).
In regard to September 11, images of people throwing themselves out of the
windows of the Twin Towers, as the buildings were on the brink of collapsing,
suggests humans “preferring the freedom of the sky above death by fire” (Versluijs
995). These images had an almost traumatic impact. Art Spiegelman’s In The Shadow
of No Towers, contains pictures of the artist as one the characters jumping from one of
the buildings on a page-filling plate in his book. Versluijs continues by commenting,
“The amazing thing is that the author admits that he is “haunted now by the images he
Van Driel 69
didn't witness” (6). He did not actually see anybody jump from the tower” (995). The
events were reported live on every news channel in the world, a traumatic experience
for many watching. As the transmission was live, no reporter commented on the
images. The traumatic images remained without a clear story of the people jumping
from the building, because in effect they committed suicide.
Chronicling traumatic events through a cinematic, apocalyptic allegory, George
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) was a horror movie with actual “walking
dead.” In a period of civil unrest, as the sixties of the twentieth century were, images
and footage of protests and violence were in the news every day, and invaded the
living rooms of every America citizen. Continuing the apocalyptic allegorical mode
developed in poems such as “The Mask of Anarchy,” the movie reflects and critiques
the consumerism and moral blindness of American culture in the sixties, Cold War
politics, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. In Romero’s movie, forms
of fiction and non-fiction come together, creating a cinematic mix of media coverage
and horror movies.
Even though these images remain in the collective memory, Susan Hirsh argues
that “[traumatism] is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst
to come, rather than by an aggression that is 'over and done with” (263). The mother
in The Road, unable to verbalise her future trauma, knows of only one escape of this
“worst to come.” Taking this theory of future trauma into consideration, a revival of
the zombie apocalypse can be explained. Kyle Bishop has explored the “marked rise
in all kinds of zombie narratives over the past [years]” (17), and argues that “the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, caused the largest wave of paranoia for
Americans since the McCarthy era” (17). This confirms Coopers statement that
“reference to American pulp apocalyptic films suggests a correlation between the
Van Driel 70
futuristic world of the novel and the fears of the current day” (222), and how this adds
to the allegorical qualities of The Road through intertextuality.
In context of the intertextuality of the films and texts mentioned in this
subchapter, an allegorical interpretation of the text explains the motif behind the
mother’s suicide and behaviour. She imagines, all horrors of their future could be just
around the corner, and, with the apocalypse just blazing outside their living room
window, she envisions how the end has come for mankind’s survival: there is nothing
left to consume, just as Byron had envisioned in Darkness.
4.5: Conclusion
This chapter has identified several of The Road’s allegorical characteristics, by
comparing it to two types of allegory: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
and the “Cave Allegory” from Plato’s The Republic (380 BC). Through an allegorical
mode, developed initially in Romantic writings such as Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy,”
and carried over into contemporary popular culture via Romero’s overtly allegorical
zombie-apocalypse narratives, The Road’s narrative expresses sentiments concerning
the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in a similar manner
as recent science fiction, horror films.
Van Driel 71
Conclusion
This thesis set out to explore the intertextual network of Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road and revealed how this modern classic continues to explore sentiments
concerning the human condition, literary modes of representation and ethical
positions developed in Romantic thought and absorbed by the modern genre of
science fiction and apocalyptic fiction. The intention of this study is not only to make
a contribution to a greater critical understanding of the apocalyptic narrative of The
Road, but also to add a new perspective to the ongoing critical discussion on the
persistence of Romantic reasoning, artistic techniques and beliefs in apocalyptic
fiction and science fiction.
The analysis of The Road’s intertextual network contributed to an
understanding that McCarthy’s novel is one of the latest additions in the tradition of
Anglo-American story writing that has its origins in Romanticism, and the genres of
science fiction and apocalyptic fiction that developed from this tradition. Regarding
the moral framework of apocalyptic narratives, the research shows that these
narratives, as well as The Road’s, closely echo a selection of Kant’s ethical principles
regarding the sanctity of human life. The Road’s narrative has shown that a loss of
morality distances the individual from humanity, which is a Romantic notion.
Furthermore, by placing cannibalism and suicide on the morally reprehensible side of
the moral framework, these narratives follow Kant’s positions concerning respect for
human life and dignity for the individual. Where The Road’s apocalyptic plot
surpasses its predecessors in the genre, is where the narrative not only creates a strong
contrast in its moral framework, but also creates a setting omitting the possibility of
renewal or transformation for humankind and resurgence of nature. Additionally, the
Van Driel 72
dramatic effect of this contrast is created by the intrinsically benevolent nature of the
boy, and his father’s devotion to him.
Concerning Kant’s theories on the act of hope, The Road’s narrative denies its
protagonists a future to be rationally hoped for, and therefore, the theoretical question
of hope remains only in the realm of faith. In regard to the theoretical question, the
narrative mythically depicts the end of the world with traces of a biblical language,
through a universal moral framework facilitating a hope beyond rationality, as this is
the only possibility for the act of hope. The father continues the old-world rituals and
beliefs, even though he claims, “there is no God and we are his prophets” (181). The
characters’ morality as well as their reasons to live, are the focus of the narrative. In
light of all the hopelessness, the narrator says, “He knew only that the child was his
warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (5). Furthermore, the
man is fully aware that all the supporting structures of belief and moral conduct have
been destroyed: “Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in ashen air.
Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone” (10).
Nevertheless, the man knows, by keeping his son alive and taking care of him, he
creates not only the rational basis for hope, but also supports his own belief in the
continuation of his son’s life. This is symbolised by “the fire,” passed on by the man,
carried by his son. The Road surpasses contemporary and earlier apocalyptic
narratives in the genre in its bleakness and hopelessness by combining its Kantian
perspectives on hope with an emphasis on the transcendental.
The Road bares evidence of a shift in the typical apocalyptic plot of the postapocalyptic genre. Moving past the apocalyptic event, the plot describes a time during
which only inner transformation remains possible. This literary shift is depicted
through the father-son relationship, mainly focussing on their inherent qualities of
Van Driel 73
mind and character. The main characters’ transformation is mainly guided by a
religious tendency in their moral framework. The narrative depicts this transformation
of the inner psyche through experiences addressing the boy’s intuition and moral
compass and the man’s care for his son and his elegiac memories of the past. All of
The Road’s descriptions of dreams, thoughts, and setting, are of a pastoral, Romantic,
quality and depict an interest in the natural, physical world of the past, as well as the
inner, psychological world of the present. Besides recalling these tropes and motifs of
Romanticism, The Road presents a unprecedented variety of gentle road-movie motifs
in a post-apocalyptic environment, reaching for the final frontier of human
imagination and beyond the natural world.
Finally, this thesis was a study of morality, respect for life, nature and the
future of mankind in The Road. The relationship between these concepts is depicted
mainly through the sublime musings of the narrator, the man, and conversations
between him, his son, and other characters. The narrative is rife with intertextuality
and sentiments of Romanticism and science fiction, abundant with religious language,
and closely relates to a universal theory of morality, but its meaning is secular in
nature.
The Road appears to be a complex twenty-first-century allegory that expresses
Romantic sentiments concerning the human condition at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. This appears to be consistent through the use of its narrative voice,
where the narrative creates a melancholy and sharp perspective on the environment
through symbolic and romantic visions of the natural world. Furthermore, the
intertextuality with classic allegorical texts of Plato, Bunyan, and narratives of
contemporary apocalyptic fiction, provides an appropriate framework for an
allegorical interpretation of The Road, which, despite some of its antiquated figurative
Van Driel 74
language and contextual reference is still able to relate to the modern reader. From
The Road’s allegorical interpretation can be concluded that the nameless man is a
barer of knowledge and experience of the natural and cultural world, and personifies
the resourceful, imaginative and independent, but also the traumatised. His nameless
son lacks the knowledge and experience of the natural and cultural world. He is like a
blank slate, personifying the dependent, unimaginative and morally radicalised, but
also the benevolent.
Van Driel 75
Bibliography
Aldiss, Brian W. Greybeard. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1965. eBook.
Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition. Ed. William Burroughs. London: Fourth Estate,
2011. Print.
---. The Drowned World. London: Fourth Estate, 2011. Print.
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory – An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Print.
Bennett, Barbara. “Celtic Influences on Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men
and The Road.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 38.5 (2008): 2-3. Web. 3
Oct. 2014.
Berger, Arthur Asa. Cultural Criticism: A Primer of Key Concepts. London, UK:
Sage, 1995.
Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999. eBook.
Birch, Dinah, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford U,
2009. eBook.
Bishop, Kyle William. “Dead Man Still Walking.” Journal of Popular Film and
Television 37.1 (2009): 16-25. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.
Blake, William. “London.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 13 Dec. 2014.
Boyer, Paul. “The Growth of Fundamentalist Apocalyptic in the United States.” The
Continuum History of Apocalypticism. Ed. Bernard J. McGinn, John J.
Collins, and Stephen J. Stein. New York: Continuum International, 2003. 516543. Web. 25 Oct. 2014.
Van Driel 76
Brasi, Gabriela. “Reading Allegory and Nature in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:
Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Vision of the Language of Nature.” Arcadia
49.1 (2014): 89–102. Web. 5 Oct. 2014.
Brooks, Max. World War Z. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 2007. eBook.
Brooks-Gordon, Belinda, ed. Death Rites and Rights. Oxford: Hart, 2007. eBook.
Brown, Jennifer. Cannibalism in Literature and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013. eBook.
Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will Men, Women and Rape. Newburyport: Open
Road Media, 2013. eBook.
Bould, Mark, and Sherryl Vint. The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction.
London: Routledge, 2011. eBook.
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. London: Penguin Books, 1987. Print.
Burt, Stephen. “Science Fiction and Life after Death.” American Literary History 26.1
(2014): 168-90. Web. 1 Nov. 2014.
Byron, George Gordon. “Darkness.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
Caruth, Cathy. “After the End: A Response.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 41.2
(2008): 121-129. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
Charles, Ron. “‘Apocalypse Cow,’ by Michael Logan.” The Washington Post 1 Oct.
2013. Web. 5 Oct. 2014.
Chignell, Andrew. “Kant on Hoping for a Miracle.” New York: Cornell University.
2011.
Cholbi, Michael. Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions. London: Broadview Press,
2011. eBook.
Cooper, Lydia. “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative.”
Studies in the Novel 43.2 (2011): 219–36. Web. 5 Oct. 2014.
Van Driel 77
Cratchley, Drew, and Paul Osborne. “Ten Years On, Reef Mystery Remains.”
Brisbane Times 23 Jan. 2008, National sec. Fairfax Digital, Australia. Web. 22
Oct. 2014.
Crisp, Peter. “Allegory and symbol - a fundamental opposition?” Language and
Literature 14 (2005): 323-338. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.
Danta, Chris. “‘The Cold Illicit World’: The Poetics of Gray in Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road.” Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Ed. Julian
Murphet, and Mark Steven. London: Continuum International Group, 2012. 926. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.
Day, Aidan. Romanticism. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Eldridge, Richard Thomas. The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy
and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. eBook.
Gerdts, Ben. “Dust, Ash, and the Sublime: Tracing Kant’s Aesthetics in Cormac
McCarthy’s The Crossing and The Road.” MA Thesis. University of South
Florida, 2010. Web. 29 Nov. 2014.
Greenwood, Willard P. Reading Cormac McCarthy. Santa Barbara: Greenwood,
2009. eBook.
Guillemin, Georg. The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 2004. eBook.
Harman, Gilbert. “Moral Relativism Defended.” The Philosophical Review 84.1
(1975): 3-22. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
Hillier, Russell M. “‘In a Dark Parody’ of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress:
The Presence of Subversive Allegory in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark.”
American Notes and Queries 19.4 (2006): 52-59. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.
Van Driel 78
Hirsch, Susan F. The Moment of the Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief, and a
Victim’s Quest for Justice. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Web. 22 Oct. 2014.
Hobbes, Thomas. The Elements of Law. Natural & Political. Ed. Ferdinand Tönnies.
New York, Routledge. 2013, eBook.
Horn, Eva. “The Last Man: The Birth of the Modern Apocalypse in Jean Paul, John
Martin, and Lord Byron.” Operative Catastrophes. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2013. Web. 4 Oct. 2014.
Hume, David. Essays on Suicide, and the Immortality of… [sic] Eloisa. Oxford:
University of Oxford, 2003. eBook.
Hunt, Isabelle M., Nicola Swinson, Ben Palmer, Pauline Turnbull, Jayne Cooper,
David While, Kirsten Windfuhr, Jenny Shaw, Louis Appleby, and Navneet
Kapur. “Method of Suicide in the Mentally Ill: A National Clinical Survey.”
Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 40.1 (2010): 22-34. Web. 13 Oct.
2014.
James, Edward, and Farah Mendlesohn. The Cambridge Companion to Science
Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. eBook.
James, P. D. Children of Men. London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 2010. eBook.
Janet, Maslin. “The Road Through Hell, Paved with Desperation.” The New York
Times 25 Sept. 2006. Books sec. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.
Johnson, Gary. The Vitality of Allegory: Figural Narrative in Modern and
Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. eBook
Juge, Carole. “The Road to the Sun They Cannot See: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave,
Oblivion, and Guidance in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Cormac
McCarthy Journal 7.1 (2009): 16-30. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.
Van Driel 79
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn. South
Bend, IN: Infomotions, 2001. Web. 19 Nov. 2014.
---. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. Trans. Thomas Kingsmill
Abbott. Web. 19 November 2014.
---. Lectures on Ethics. Ed. Peter Heath, and J. B. Schneewind New York: Cambridge
UP, 1997. Print.
---. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings. Ed. Allen W.
Wood and George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998. eBook.
Kakutani, Michiko. “On the Loose in Badlands: Killer With a Cattle Gun.” The New
York Times 18 July 2005. Books sec. Web. 3 Oct. 2014.
Kelley, Theresa M. Reinventing Allegory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997. eBook.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000. eBook.
Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1974.
Print.
King, Stephen. The Stand. London: Hodder, 2011. Print.
Kunsa, Ashley. “‘Maps of the World in its Becoming’: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Journal of Modern Literature 33.1 (2009):
57-74. Web. 5 Oct. 2014.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. London: Picador. 2010. Print.
Lane, Emily, “Hell On Earth: A Modern Day Inferno in Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road” (2010). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. Paper
1127. Web. 4 Oct. 2014.
Van Driel 80
Lewis, Peter. “CANNIBALS; Faced with Almost Certain Death, the Shipwrecked
Crew Broke the Ultimate Taboo. They Were Sentenced to Hang amid Uproar
in Victorian Britain. How Would They Be Judged Today?” Daily Mail 2 Oct.
1999. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.
Lipscomb, Benjamin, J. Bruxvoort., and James Krueger, eds. Kant's Moral
Metaphysics: God, Freedom, and Immortality. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010.
Print.
Lloyd, Sharon A., and Susanne Sreedhar. “Hobbes’ Moral and Political Philosophy”.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition). Web. 30
September 2014.
Machosky, Brenda. Structures of Appearing: Allegory & The Work of Literature.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. eBook.
Mars-Jones, Adam. “Life after Armageddon.” The Observer 26 Nov. 2006. Observer
Review sec. Guardian News & Media Limited. Web. 1 Oct. 2014.
Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. London: Gollancz, 2007. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an
Appendix of Songs. Trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann. New York: Vintage,
1974. eBook.
Oakley, Todd, and Peter Crisp. “Honeymoons and Pilgrimages: Conceptual
Integration and Allegory in Old and New Media.” Metaphor and Symbol 26.2
(2011): 152-159. Web. 20 Sept. 2014.
Pal, Amitabh. “We Need a Different Approach Toward Iran.” The Progressive 9
November 2011.Web. 2 October 2014.
Van Driel 81
Pavesich, Vida. “The anthropology of Hope and the Philosophy of History:
Rethinking Kant’s Third and Fourth Questions with Blumenberg and
McCarthy.” Thesis Eleven 104.1 (2011): 20-39. Web. 20 Sept. 2014.
Pearson, Simon. A Brief History of the End of the World: From Revelation to Ecodisaster. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006. Print.
Phillips, Kendall R. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Westport,
CT: Praeger, 2005. eBook.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. London:
Penguin Books, 1999. eBook.
---. “Dreamland.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 13 December 2014.
Puringer, Julia, Alexandra Ganser and Markus Rheindorf. “BAKHTIN'S
CHRONOTOPE ON THE ROAD: Space, Time, and Place in Road Movies
Since the 1970s.” Linguistics and Literature 4.1 (2006): 1-17. Web. 13 Oct.
2014.
Rambo, Shelley L. “Beyond Redemption?: Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
after the End of the World.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 41.2 (2008).
Web. 4 Oct. 2014.
Reiman, Donald H, and Neil Fraistat. eds. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. New York,
US: Norton, 2002. Print.
Schaub, Thomas H. “Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.”
Renascence 61.3 (2009): 153-168. Web. 30 Sep. 2014.
Schone, Mark. “‘The Custom of the Sea’ by Neil Hanson and ‘In the Heart of the Sea’
by Nathaniel Philbrick.” Salon 13 Apr. 2000. Entertainment sec. Web. 1 Oct.
2014.
Shelley, Mary W. The Last Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Van Driel 82
---. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Print.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandias.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
---. “Sonnet to a balloon, laden with knowledge.” Romantic Circles. Web. 9 Dec.
2014.
Shute, Nevil. On The Beach. London: Vintage, 2009. Print.
Søfting, Inger-Anne. “Desert Pandemonium: Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalyptic
‘Western’ in ‘Blood Meridian’.” American Studies in Scandinavia 31.2
(1999): 13-30. Web. 26 Nov. 2014.
Soylent Green. Dir. Richard Fleischer. Perf. Charlton Heston. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
1973. DVD.
Stableford, Brian M. Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. New York:
Routledge, 2006. Print.
Tambling, Jeremy. Allegory, 2009. London: Routledge. eBook.
Tierney, Thomas F. “Suicidal thoughts: Hobbes, Foucault and the Right to Die”.
Philosophy & Social Criticism 32 (2006): 601-638. Web. 30 September 2014.
"The French Revolution: Apocalyptic Expectations." The Norton Anthology of
English Literature: The Romantic Age: Topic 3: Overview. Web. 15 Dec.
2014.
The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 2010. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.
The War of the Worlds. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount Home Entertainment, 2006.
DVD.
Troyer, John. The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill. Indianapolis: Hackett
Pub., 2003. eBook.
Van Driel 83
Versluijs, Kristiaan. “Art Spiegelman’s In The Shadow of No Towers: 9-11 and the
Reprentations of Trauma.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 9801003. Web. 15 Nov. 2014.
Wagar, W. Warren. Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things. Indiana: Indiana
University Press, 1982. eBook.
Walsh, Christopher. The Wake of the Sun: Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac
McCarthy. Knoxville: Newfound Press, 2009. Web. 11 Dec. 2014.
Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. London, UK: Penguin Books, 2005. Print.
Wells, H. G. The War of the Worlds. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.
Print.
Wielenberg, Erik J. “God, Morality, and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.”
Cormac McCarthy Journal 8.1 (2010). Web. 17 Sept, 2012.
Winfrey, Oprah. Interview with Cormac McCarthy. Oprah’s Book Club. 2007. Web.
2 Oct. 2014.
Woodward, Richard. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times 19
Apr. 1992. Web. 25 Nov. 2014.
World War Z. Dir. Mark Forster. Perf. Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos. Paramount Pictures,
2013. Film.
Wheeler, Kathleen. “Kant and Romanticism.” Philosophy and Literature 13.1 (April
1989): 42-56. Print.
Wydham, John. The Day of the Triffids. London: Penguin Books. 2000, Print.