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).
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.
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).
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
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
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
(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)
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
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)
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
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.