Abstract:

The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy, narrating the journey of two unnamed characters, a father and a son, through the devastated American landscape in the aftermath of a catastrophe, the nature of which remains unspecified throughout the narrative. Unlike science-fiction dystopias which present worlds with meticulously detailed political and social institutions in alien yet uncannily familiar settings, the earth is devoid of almost any signs of civilization in The Road. As such, the narrative presents a symbolic vacuum, an absence of socio-economic context and personal ties that constitute the real and help create meaning in life. Hence, constantly confronted with the threat of starvation and violence, the father and the son keep revisiting the question why they should struggle to survive rather than simply give in and commit suicide just as the mother did some time ago. The common answer they give to this question is that they are “the good guys” and they “carry the fire” although it is clear that one’s understanding of these expressions is not necessarily the same as the other’s. I will argue in this paper that, by depicting a world empty of almost all signifieds and life barely sustained in the shadow of outdated signifiers, which can be seen as a means of taking postmodern contingency to its extreme, The Road raises the questions of what makes life meaningful and what is the ethical responsibility of being in the aftermath of postmodern apocalypse. 

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