The End of the RoadThe Road: a Twenty-First-Century Post-Apocalyptic Narrative as

a Complex Post-Romantic Allegory

Gert van Driel1051180

MA Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture17 December 2014

Supervisor: Dr. Evert Jan van LeeuwenSecond reader: Inge ’t Hart MA, MPhil.

Contents

Introduction....................................................................................................................1Intertextuality.............................................................................................................3The Romantic Origins of Apocalyptic Science Fiction.............................................3The Significance of Allegory.....................................................................................9Kant and the International Framework....................................................................10

Chapter 1: Perspectives on Survival Ethics in The Road: Cannibalism and Suicide...141.1: Introduction.......................................................................................................141.2: Ethical Positions on Survival Cannibalism in the Romantic Period, compared to The Road and Other Apocalyptic Narratives......................................151.3: Ethical and Psychological Perspectives on Suicide in The Road and Other Apocalyptic Narratives..................................................................................241.4: Conclusion........................................................................................................29

Chapter 2: The Symbol of Fire and the Religious Propensities of Hope in The Road..................................................................................................................31

2.1: Introduction.......................................................................................................312.2: The Fire: A Secular and Religious Symbol of Hope........................................322.3: The Moral Radicalisation of People’s Characters in Regard to Hope..............362.4: The Road’s Tendency Towards the Theoretical Question of What to Hope....402.5: Conclusion........................................................................................................45

Chapter 3: Romantic Perspectives on a Post-Apocalyptic Road Narrative.................463.1: Introduction.......................................................................................................463.2: The Post-Apocalyptic Narrative Shift...............................................................463.3: A Road-Narrative: Place, Time and a Romantic Perspective...........................503.4: Conclusion........................................................................................................55

Chapter 4: Man Against Nature: Allegorical Mode and Elements in The Road..........574.1: Introduction.......................................................................................................574.2: Allegorical Interpretation..................................................................................574.3: Allegorical Conventions in The Road...............................................................604.4: Return to the Cave: Plato Revisited..................................................................634.5: Horror Movies: Allegorising Trauma and the Human Condition.....................664.5: Conclusion........................................................................................................70

Conclusion...................................................................................................................71Bibliography.................................................................................................................75

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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 ashen-grey,

“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)

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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

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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 above-

mentioned 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 fully-

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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.

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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.

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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

the Romantic age. He adds that Romantics did characterise “allegory negatively” and

1 Despite the Romantics’ resistance to allegory, some of the major Romantic poems invite allegorical readings; Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” for instance.

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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

and science fiction are international literary movements, and the ideas, motifs and

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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.

According to Kant, “intuition” was a conceptual attribute every individual possessed.

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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

Man’s hopelessness is unique, and there would be no novel like it in post-apocalyptic

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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).

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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!”

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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)

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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)

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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

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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

and supernatural authority seem to have become obsolete. All forms of devotion are

2 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).

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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

indicates several times, is not yet void of people, but it is deprived of all natural

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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,

current or future, to be in a position to rationally determine to whether suicide

Van Driel 25

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

to save him from the anticipated horrors that await them. In reference to the collective

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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

that the man feels his wife is about to make an immoral decision, her decision appears

Van Driel 27

“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,

making his death easier to bare. Neville understands he is the only real human left and

Van Driel 28

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

has become a measure of victory.” This substantiates the woman’s accuracy of her

Van Driel 29

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.

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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.

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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

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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,

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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

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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 post-

apocalyptic 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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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“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

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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:

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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]

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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.

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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).

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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 eco-

system. 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).

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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

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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

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conversations. All these elements, invoke The Road’s Romanticism, best described by

Eldridge’s definition of key tropes of literary Romanticism: “imagination, nature-

place, 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

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(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)

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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

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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)

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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

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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.

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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 twenty-

first century, this chapter ends with an analysis of its important reference to zombie-

horror 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 post-

modernist pageant, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), [allegories] in the prototypical

generic sense, largely disappeared by the late 17th century. (156)

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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 seventeenth-

century 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

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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 post-

apocalyptic 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

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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:

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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:

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 post-

apocalyptic. 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)

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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 meaning-

making 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

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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

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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.

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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

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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 post-

apocalyptic 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

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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 twenty-

first 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

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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.

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