ROAD WITHOUT END

ROAD WITHOUT END: CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE ROAD AND THE ENDS OF

HUMANISM, NEOLIBERALISM AND APOCALYPSE

By

ANDREW RESZITNYK, B.A.

A Major Research Project

Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree

Master of Arts

McMaster University

©Copyright by Andrew Reszitnyk, September 2011

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MASTER OF ARTS (2011) McMaster University

(Cultural Studies and Critical Theory) Hamilton, Ontario

TITLE: Road Without End: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Ends of

Neoliberalism, Humanism, and Apocalypse

AUTHOR: Andrew Reszitnyk, B.A. (University of Toronto: St. Michael’s College)

SUPERVISOR: Dr. David L. Clark

NUMBER OF PAGES: 60

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Preface—A Brief History of American Literary Apocalypticism

Ostensibly chronicling the last days of human civilization, illustrating the blasted

landscape of a dying earth, and meditating upon the final throes of a species reckoning

with its imminent demise, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road is an exemplar of

the contemporary apocalyptic imagination. McCarthy envisions a world afflicted by an

unspecified catastrophe, where the “[n]ights [are] dark beyond darkness and the days

more gray each one than what had gone before.”i A father and son travel southward

across a lifeless Americaii in an apparently hopeless trek, which is almost certain to end in

meaningless death. Illustrating a fantasy world with gritty realism, incorporating utopian

moments into a narrative dominated by catastrophe, and blending intensely personal

meditations with an eschatological scope, McCarthy’s representation of a small family’s

journey at the end of time “both invites and frustrates interpretation,”iii as Chris Walsh

notes. Critics have read The Road through various generic conventions in attempts to

make sense of it: Walsh regards it as a southern pastoral,iv Linda Woodson asserts that it

“fits best in the genre of journey literature,”v Willard Greenwood claims it “dabbles in

social realism,”vi while Randall Wilhelm argues that it incorporates aspects of the still life

genre of visual art.vii In this paper, I primarily read it as an apocalyptic work.viii How is

apocalypticism significant in the American literary tradition out of which McCarthy

emerges? What distinguishes the apocalyptic fantasies of today from those of the past?

The history of apocalypticism is the history of interpretation: interpretation of the

disclosure of meaning and the meaning of disclosure. The term “apocalypse” comes from

the Ancient Greek “apokalupsis”—the first word in the New Testament Book of

Revelation—which means “to disclose, to uncover, to unveil.”ix Catherine Keller informs

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us that, prior to its use in the bible, the expression referred to “the marital stripping of the

veiled virgin.”x Traditionally understood as the culmination, or termination, of an era,

“the apocalyptic moment” occurs when, according to Jacques Derrida, there is a

“disclosure that lets be seen what until then remained enveloped, withdrawn, held back,

reserved.”xi James Berger calls apocalypse the “definitive catastrophe”xii—it brings all

things to their essential conclusion, puts an end to difference, settles all accounts once

and for all. Although interpretations of the significance of apocalypse have substantially

altered over time, apprehensions of the day of reckoning have had a constant allure for

American writers, critics, and theologians. “[S]ince its very beginnings, America has

been curiously fascinated by visions of the end,”xiii Joseph Dewey explains.xiv In what

follows, I chart some of the iterations of apocalypticism in American literary culture,

attending to how the nature of the unveiling, the unveiler, the unveiled truth, and the

aftermath have altered throughout history. By clearing the ground in this way, I hope to

do justice to the singularity of McCarthy’s work, recognizing not only how it hearkens

back to old traditions, but also how it subverts or modifies them in our contemporary

context.xv All of the works I discuss resonate in The Road’s themes, language and tropes.

Although there are “apocalyptic” myths and stories in almost every culture,xvi the

Book of Revelation has served as the template for nearly all American apocalypticisms.

What is “disclosed” in Revelation is nothing less than the course of human history: the

final judgment and destiny of the damned and the chosen. At the time of the apocalypse,

the Christ returns, the will of God made manifest, the world of sin is destroyed, good

triumphs over evil, and a new heaven and earth is brought into being. Fleeing a society

they considered sinful, risking life and livelihood in an inhospitable environment, the

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Puritan settlers of what would become the United States interpreted themselves through

the prophecies of Revelation. They saw echoes of the salvation of the 144,000 righteous

from the depraved kingdom of the Beast in their flight from decadent Europe; parallels

between God’s establishment of a New Jerusalem at the end of time and their attempts to

construct a pious nation upon the supposedly “virgin” continent. As Dewey argues:

Certain that they understood history’s larger pattern, secure within their religious commitment, they faced shipwrecks, Indian raids, stubborn or failed crops...[and] the steady, grinding isolation and terrifying sense of displacement—all with the resilient optimism that God sanctified their mission and that the day of glory was fast approaching. Even as they built the New World, they waited for its end.xvii

What is most distinctive about seventeenth-century American apocalypticism, compared

to later iterations, is that the Puritan settlers did not regard Revelation as a myth. For

them, it was an accurate prophecy, soon to come to fruition. Proclaiming the American

colonies to be the final strongholds of God’s elect, John Cotton’s 1642 sermon “The

Powring Out of the Seven Vialls” embodies this unwavering belief in the imminence of

the end of days, setting the apocalypse’s date in the year 1655. While early Puritans like

John Cotton optimistically regarded the forthcoming end of the world as a triumphant

event—probably because they hoped it would serve as a reward for their worldly trials—

over time, the parousia came to be apprehended with greater trepidation. As the prospect

of actual destruction began to seem less and less likely as more and more time was spent

in the New World without cataclysm, apocalyptic writings became bleaker and even

more ferociously didactic. Cotton Mather’s 1692 sermon “A Midnight Cry,” for example,

describes the apocalypse as a frightening necessity—a violent and terrifying purging of

the wicked that will make way for God’s eternal kingdom. Significantly modifying these

earlier interpretations of apocalypse, Jonathan Edwards, in the series of 1739 sermons

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published as History of the Work of Redemption, regards the parousia as both imminent

(though he refused to set a date) and immanent: imminent insofar as he understood the

final judgment to be a forthcoming historical event (presumably in the not-too-distant

future), and immanent insofar as he saw grace at work in human history, progressively

inclining humanity towards the time of God’s reign.

Apocalypticism in America underwent a significant transformation following the

1776 Revolution. Dewey explains that after the United States declared its independence,

“[t]he rhetoric of apocalyptic temper, with its radiant confidence in kingdoms-to-come,

emerged not in the vocabulary of sermons, but in that of lawyers and politicians, the

architects of the new American political entity.”xviii These architects pushed the

millenarian proclamations of their Puritan forebears one step further, even as they

secularized them. They suggested not that their young country was the final, pious,

outpost of the global Christian nation, but rather the first nation of a new age, the great

representative of the human intellect, which would do away with superstitious

primitivism, and, through its exemplary model, redeem the rest of the corrupt world.

Colonel David Humphreys, a protégé of George Washington, who became both poet and

politician, affirmed that

America, after having been concealed for so many ages… was probably discovered, in the maturity of time, to become the theatre for displaying the illustrious designs of Providence in its dispensations to the human race.xix

While they previously believed that only the divine hand of God was capable of bringing

about the apocalypse, disclosing the nature of reality, and shaping the ideal world of the

future, once independent, writers in the American colonies began to speculate that,

perhaps, humans could play an active role in the unveiling of the phenomenal world.

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After all, was not splitting from the British Empire to found an enlightened country,

which stood as an inspiration to the rest of the world, almost like precipitating a mini-

apocalypse? America could be understood as the implement of God’s apocalyptic plan, if

not as the first post-apocalyptic nation.

Perhaps because of patriotic interpretations of this kind, apocalypse remained a

potent image in nineteenth-century American literature, even if it was no longer believed

by most to be an actual occurrence. The parousia was expressed not as an event, but as a

metaphor for the experiences of individuals, nations, or epochs. I suggest that there were

three major strains of apocalypticism in this period: positivist narratives about man-made

apocalypses creating modern “post-apocalyptic” communities; romantic apocalypses

about psychological revelations; and nationalist apocalypses about the Civil War.

Herman Melville’s 1850 The White Jacket harbours examples of this first variety. In it,

Melville issues an admonition to abolish flogging in the navy, which invokes the United

States’ millennial destiny:

[W]e Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world…God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race;...the political Messiah…has come in us.xx

In this view, the American people, informed by the scientific and philosophical

breakthroughs of the Enlightenment, are God’s revelation, constructing the kingdom of

heaven upon earth day-by-day. Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick similarly takes up this

strain of apocalypticism, “follow[ing] the traditional apocalyptic pattern,” as Zbigniew

Lewicki contends, “in which the universe is destroyed only to be reborn.”xxi

Edgar Allen Poe’s works exemplify the second form of apocalypticism, taking on

apocalyptic airs to convey emotional turmoil. The narrator of the 1839 short story “The

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Fall of the House of Usher,” describes the horror he feels upon observing the Usher

family estate as “the after-dream of the reveler upon opium…the hideous dropping off of

the veil,”xxii alluding to apocalypse’s literal meaning in order to describe the apprehension

of alterity and fear within the human psyche. The ending of Poe’s 1838 novel The

Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which concludes in the wastes of the Antarctic sea with

the appearance of a strange humanoid, likewise employs apocalyptic imagery and

language to convey psychic collapse. Poe’s individualized, hallucinatory end-times and

revelations starkly contrast with the Puritan apocalypses, which were supposed to bring

finality to the whole of the earth, or at least to the entirety of Christendom.

Stephen Crane’s 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage is an example of the third

kind of nineteenth-century apocalypticism. Crane’s young narrator relies upon

apocalyptic language to make warfare coherent. He describes the meeting of the Union

and Confederate armies as an “onslaught of redoubtable dragons,”xxiii musing that, by

contrast, the aftermath of battle is like “an existence of soft and eternal peace.”xxiv In

visions of this kind, America is interpreted as both actor and stage in an unfolding

apocalyptic drama: its antebellum populace the decadent, pre-apocalyptic humanity; its

internal war God’s violent, purging destruction of the wicked; its reunited nation, ruled

by strong, battle-tested men, the New Jerusalem made actual.

The significance and use of apocalypticism in American literary culture once again

underwent a significant modification in the early twentieth-century. In the aftermath of

World War I, the apocalypse became a common trope for articulating growing pessimism

about modernity. T.S Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men” is almost certainly a product

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of this pessimism, ending with some of the most famous lines in all of American

poetryxxv:

This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.xxvi

Eliot’s visions of the end times strays far from the glorious, divine theatrics of the Puritan

parousia, the exultant post-apocalyptic communities of the late-eighteenth and

nineteenth-century patriots and positivists, and the personal, gut wrenching revelations of

the romantics. Eliot’s end is not immediate and decisive (“not with a bang”), but drawn

out and pitiable (“a whimper”). It suggests an apocalyptic truth that is not univocal,

personal, and revealing, but multifaceted, disconcerting, and maybe even meaningless—

notions prefigured in the seemingly random assemblage of references and images in

Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Waste Land.” The fantasy of an ignoble, impersonal apocalypse,

without redemption or revelation, would come to dominate apocalyptic narratives in the

twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as writers, struggling to make sense of the brutal

crimes committed by humanity against humanity, began to doubt whether existence even

has meaning and, if it does, whether this meaning could ever be disclosed or known.

Using apocalyptic imagery and rhetoric to illustrate the human casualties of the

Great Depression and the environmental cataclysms of the 1930s Dust Bowl disaster,

John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath exemplifies this sort of cynical

twentieth-century apocalypticism. Steinbeck treats the Depression as an economic

apocalypse with catastrophic effects for American society. He tells of a family—the

Joads—who flee an agrarian Oklahoma that has been ravaged by drought and dust

storms. They set out for California in hopes of finding work and sanctuary, only to

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discover upon reaching their destination that the conditions and prospects are bleak: there

is an overabundance of workers, few good jobs, and a dearth of civil rights and

protections. The Grapes of Wrath invokes the apocalypticism of the Puritan tradition, but

with a major twist: although a catastrophic destruction takes place, the promised New

Jerusalem never comes, hope is stillborn, and the people are left wanting and hungry

(literally—in the final scene of the novel, the young Rose of Sharon, who had just given

birth to a dead child, breastfeeds a starving man).

The horrors of World War II—including the massive destruction of life,

industrialized genocide, and the first use of atomic weapons—and the post-War nuclear

arms race had a profound effect on American apocalyptic literature. For the first time

since the days of the Puritans, it was mainstream to believe that the world was on the

cusp of oblivion. Facing the real possibility of annihilation, writers began questioning

whether a rejuvenated post-apocalyptic world should be conceptualized or desired:

perhaps the fantasy of an “unveiled” state of being is what enabled despicable crimes to

be justified in the name of progress or purity.

Jack Kerouac’s 1957 On The Road, a novelistic version of real-life travels across

the post-War United States with various members of the Beat Generation, casts doubt on

the possibility of a pure disclosed truth of existence, hearkening back to the Romantic

psychological, individual disclosure. The definitive American journey narrative, On The

Road is not, strictly speaking, an apocalyptic story. I include it in this genealogy insofar

as the Beats’ ramblings precipitate numerous experiences of “unveiling” upon the eternal

frontier of the nation’s roads. Kerouac’s revelations are not cataclysmic, sudden, or

illuminating. They are instead private, personal experiences. His characters journey with

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no fixed destination, experiencing an ongoing, transient apocalypse without a final

destiny or meaning. “There’s always more, a little further—it never ends,”xxvii Sal

Paradise, a thinly veiled pseudonym for Kerouac himself, declares. In the absence of

absolute truth, all one can do is seek new experiences and stimuli. The only truth revealed

on the roads of America is the wandering, unfinished self. Although On The Road rejects

the post-1776 belief that the American nation can redeem the world, it suggests that

individual Americans may be able to find salvation (or at least gratification) for

themselves.

Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow has its own unique construal of

apocalypse, which draws upon Eliot’s musings about the “hollowness” of reality and

complicates Kerouac’s hope for personal revelation. Twisting diverse story lines together,

incorporating hundreds of characters, and shifting between points of view and points in

time, Pynchon creates a complicated narrative that centres on the V-2 missile. Invoking

the spectre of the nuclear ICBMs threatening all humanity, Pynchon’s novel offers little

consolation for those who fear the consequences of global annihilation. The universe of

Gravity’s Rainbow is not ruled by a God who can give existence a comprehensible

meaning, nor by a perfectible Man who can decode the universe; it is instead dominated

by physical forces like entropy—the natural progression of closed systems towards the

most probable state, namely, uniformity, disorder, and heat-death—and gravity, which

are utterly indifferent to humanity’s fate. Scott Sanders notes that, for Pynchon, “Gravity

becomes the paranoid God, wreaking destruction upon a cosmos imagined, in Puritan

terms, as innately depraved. There are no possibilities for grace in this metaphysic: it is

Calvinist theology conceived in the mode of perdition rather than salvation.”xxviii

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Scientists, the alleged interpreters of these physical laws, are afforded no special status:

Pynchon represents them as frequently confused and often insane. No one can ever

understand the nature of the universe or grasp the patterns of history, as the Puritans once

supposed. To be human is to be always in an apocalyptic time without hope of revelation.

The image of a missile’s parabolic flight captures our apocalyptic destiny, illustrating

humanity’s futile struggle against gravity—a synecdoche for all inhuman physical forces

—which ends inevitably in obliteration. Pynchon writes that “everything, always,

collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of

no surprise, no second chances, no return.”xxix

The Road’s rendering of apocalyptic revelation appears to be in complete accord

with Pynchon’s account. What truth is unveiled in upon The Road’s fading earth? “The

frailty of everything revealed at last,” xxx would seem to be the answer of McCarthy’s

narrator. In the bleak wasteland of The Road, the American Puritans’ utopian prophecies

of resurrection, revelation and reconstruction are unfulfilled, left to wither and perish.xxxi

This universe cares not for human dreams; the planet proceeds upon its celestial journey

unperturbed by the destruction of civilizations, disclosing no truth, offering no promise of

renewal. On the surface, it looks as if McCarthy conjures solely the pessimistic, non-

redemptive strain of American apocalypticism, inclining readers towards believing that,

whether the apocalypse is induced by nuclear war, climate change, or some other

extinction event, humanity will disappear without meaning, with “no second chances, no

return.” We should be wary, however, of too quickly classifying The Road as just another

instance of nuclear age nihilism. If nothing else, the ending of the novel—a bizarrely

hopeful, nostalgic reconstruction of a pseudo-nuclear family, and a meditation upon trout

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swimming to the sea—should give us pause and lead us to inquire: What does it mean for

something to terminate? Does anything come after “the end”? Can human concepts cease

to be, without a trace? What is the use of apocalyptic narratives if all existence is void?

To answer these questions, and situate McCarthy’s bleak narrative within the

contemporary apocalyptic imagination, we are obliged to attend to not only the literary

tradition out of which The Road emerges, but also to the context in which it was released

and read, and to the theoretical framework through which apocalypse has been

interpreted. In what follows, I address the characteristics and pragmatics of contemporary

apocalyptic discourse, contrasting it with earlier traditions, addressing how McCarthy’s

novel responds to the current socio-political climate. Against Vereen Bell’s insistence

that “McCarthy’s novels are as innocent of theme and of ethical reference as they are of

plot,”xxxii and Greenwood’s contention that The Road is “unburdened by… cultural and

historical details,”xxxiii on account of its apocalyptic, other-worldly setting, I suggest that

The Road is a politico-cultural critique, which uses the historically over-determined

fantasy of apocalypse in three different ways: 1) To symptomatically reproduce the ends

of various concepts—including humanism, progress, the social and the ethical—said to

have gone extinct in our late-capitalist world; 2) To demonstrate the re-iteration of these

concepts after their ostensible end, denaturalizing contemporary post-apocalyptic

presumptions of terminality; and 3) To suspend the finality implied by apocalyptic

discourse, positing what Derrida calls an “apocalypse without apocalypse,”xxxiv i.e. a

perpetually deferred parousia without the expectation of revelation, which, refusing the

assurance of closure, remains anxiously hopeful for an unknown future yet-to-come,

about which prescient knowledge is impossible.xxxv

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Section 1—Road To Nowhere: The Road and Contemporary Apocalypticism

It would be a mistake to consign apocalyptic thinking to an earlier (more gullible,

more superstitious) stage of human history or period of American literature. In North

America, in the year 2011, we live in a society that is saturated with diverse “end of

days” fantasies of varying degrees of plausibility, from predictions of environmental

disaster,xxxvi trans-human science fictionsxxxvii and the spectre of what Chris Harman calls

“zombie capitalism,”xxxviii to evangelical Christian proclamations about the imminent

Rapture and New Age prophecies about the year 2012. What is distinctive about our time

is not the presence or absence of apocalyptic narratives, but the non-redemptive nature of

contemporary envisionings of the world’s end. As Frederic Jameson argues, our present

is “marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future,

catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that.”xxxix

Whereas the apocalypse was once understood as the revelation of humanity’s destiny and

as the rejuvenation of a cultural model, it is today, in the words of Teresa Heffernan,

“associated...with disaster and a sense of exhaustion with the model itself.”xl In contrast

to the optimistic millennialism of early American apocalyptics and the technological

utopianism of nineteenth-century positivists, there is a consensus among recent writers of

all political stripes that it is increasingly difficult to envision a positive new world order.

As Francis Fukuyama laments, “we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially

different from the present one, and at the same time better.”xli If there is a truth unveiled

in contemporary apocalyptic narratives, it seems to be “après moi, les deluge.”

The Road is surely an exemplary manifestation of this apocalyptic imagination. Its

setting, characters, and formal features embody the “exhaustion” and “disaster” that

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Heffernan describes as characteristic of contemporary apocalypticism. The novel is set

upon a dying earth, where the air grows ever colder and each day seems less luminous

than the last.xlii Nothing grows upon the once fertile ground of the formerly agrarian

South, through which the nameless father and son spend almost the entirety of the novel

travelling. The earth’s capacity for producing and sustaining life seems to have been

utterly spent. Most humans—indeed, most life forms—have little chance of surviving, let

alone flourishing, and cannibalism is a constant threat. Birds have vanished from the

skies,xliii fish from the waters,xliv and wildlife from the forests.xlv Even the once-balmy

coast of the southeastern United States, the arbitrary end-point of the protagonists’

journey, has become “[o]ne vast salt sepulcher,”xlvi a tomb for the life it can no longer

support. If a new world should emerge from this wasteland, humans will never set eyes

upon it.

The Road’s characters are as hopeless as its setting. Even though he struggles every

day to provide enough sustenance for his son and himself to survive, the unnamed father,

upon whom McCarthy’s narration focuses, foresees nothing but doom. He has no faith in

the possibility of a rejuvenated future existence and almost yearns for oblivion: “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 slowly fading from memory.”xlvii Not only is the father’s

mind worn out; his body is exhausted, near the end of its functionality. Irreparably

harmed by the catastrophe that scattered ash and dust into the atmosphere, the man’s

lungs are ravaged by coughs, which become worse and worse—eventually hacking up

blood—as the novel progresses. An old man the pair encounter on the road and share

food with is similarly wasted, looking like “a pile of rags fallen off a cart”xlviii and taking

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on the characteristics of refuse. Filled with nihilistic intuitions, he claims to have always

known that disaster was forthcoming, stating, “[p]eople were always getting ready for

tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t

even know they were there.”xlix His words suggest that, in the absence of a future that

acknowledges and, in some sense, reveres its (human) predecessors, peoples’ hopes,

plans, and expectations become hollowed of significance. Instead of an indifferent

physical force like “gravity” or “entropy,” in McCarthy’s text “Tomorrow” becomes an

inhuman, all-powerful god, capable of vindicating human existence or, as seems the case

in The Road, denigrating it.l An ideal prophet for a humanity that expects no redemption,

the old man disappears after a brief episode, never heard from again. The moldering mind

and body of these two characters not only mirror the decaying earth upon which they

tread, they personify contemporary dispositions toward apocalypse.

McCarthy conveys the desolation, exhaustion, and ahistoricty of this contemporary

apocalyptic imagination through the novel’s content and form. Greenwood suggests that

unlike McCarthy’s earlier novels, which consciously mimic the styles of great American

writers like Faulkner and Hemingway, The Road “flush[es] out the ghosts of other

authors,”li becoming what we might call McCarthy-esque. The style McCarthy uses to

articulate an apocalyptic tone starkly contrasts with Kerouac’s ever-on-the-move, stream

of consciousness narration and Pynchon’s genre-bending mélange of prose, poetry,

illustration, mysticism, and scientific discourse. As Linda Woodson observes,lii McCarthy

abandons the long-winded, paragraph-long sentences that characterized earlier works like

Blood Meridian and Suttree, and instead employs short clipped sentences, with as few

verbs and punctuation marks as possible, which communicate an impression of decay and

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sparseness. Just as little occurs on the earth’s surface in the novel’s setting, save for the

swirling of ash and the collapse of petrified trees, so few actions occur in the novel’s text.

The pages are dominated by blankness rather than script: there is space after every line

and exaggerated gaps between paragraphs. Unlike in No Country for Old Men, The

Road’s font is never italicized: it remains unchanged throughout the novel. This bare

format emphasizes that even language seems in danger of exhaustion in a world that is

“shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities.”liii The novel’s framing replicates

this “raw core”: in contrast to Blood Meridian, there are no epigraphs or bullet-point

summaries outlining the events of each section; the work is not even divided into

chapters. As there is little to help readers organize the plot into segments, the narrative

seems to trudge relentlessly forward towards its termination. The narration is similarly

unaccommodating to readers: long stretches of dialogue proceed without naming the

speakers, causing it to be often unclear who is saying what and from whose perspective

the narrative is conveyed. At times the mode of narration seems to be from a third-person

limited point-of-view, exclusively focusing upon the adult male protagonist, divulging his

thoughts and describing the setting as if through his eyes. At other times however, such

as after the man’s death, the narrator seems to be omniscient, capable of peering into the

mind of any character.liv In its apparent pessimism and dissipation, The Road typifies

contemporary renderings of apocalypse. What does this bleak apocalyptic imagination—

this “inverted millenarianism” that Jameson describes—say about our late-capitalist

culture? Why is cataclysm easier to imagine than a better future? Can we unveil its truth?

Section 2—Piecing Together The Shattered World: Theorizing Apocalypse

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Before answering these questions and attempting to determine the causes of

contemporary apocalypticism’s characteristic bleakness, we must reckon with why there

are any apocalyptic fantasies at all. What is the reason that cultures imagine their own

end? How is it that narratives of termination produce revelation? In Frank Kermode’s

view, apocalyptic visions are not necessarily indicative of a deep cultural pessimism. Just

because a society has expectations of cataclysm and narratives about the “end of days”

does not mean that it is without hope, or that it believes in an irreparable universe without

meaning. The United States’ history of apocalypticism confirms this: The Puritans

produced what are perhaps the most superficially depressing apocalyptic narratives in

American literature, describing in detail the suffering of the damned and the wrathful

violence of God. Yet, for their intended audience, the ostensibly righteous chosen people

of God, the message of these narratives is redemptive, utopian, and propitious.

Kermode suggests that the reason humans feel compelled to construct projections

of the end of the world is precisely because we will almost certainly not witness it. We

spend our lives “in the middest,”lv thrown into a world that existed before we were born

and will continue to exist after we die. Because we can never have direct, unmediated

access to the principles that govern and underwrite existence (if such principles even

exist), the only way anyone can “make sense of their span,” and interpret their own

lifetime as significant, is to imagine “fictive concords with origins and ends,”lvi which

bestow a conclusive meaning upon individual experiences of reality. Such fictions are

necessary, because to actually confront the unknowability of the future and the

unrememberability of the past is too much to bear. It is impossible to conceptualize the

sheer vastness of the universe’s existence relative to the entire span of human history, let

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alone the length of a single person’s life, without resorting to nihilism. Since “[t]ime

cannot be faced as coarse and actual, as a repository of the contingent,” Kermode

explains, “one humanizes it by fictions of orderly succession and end. The final end,

death, is something else that cannot be faced in its inhuman coarseness.”lvii For humans—

indeed, for all mortal beings—death is the absolute horizon, after which nothing can be

known, no import determined. Derrida goes so far as to assert that an individual’s death

is, in a very real sense, “every time, and every time singularly, every time irreplaceably,

every time infinitely…nothing less than an end of the world.”lviii To imagine the end of all

things is always, at some level, a way to reckon with one’s own inevitable demise. Even

though no fantasy of parousia can replicate the finality of death, it at least provides a

concrete image upon which one can fixate fears and hopes. Thus, a culture’s apocalyptic

narratives, which incorporate mortality into a larger eschatological sequence, far from

expressing or codifying despair, actually assist in the work of mourning. They “limit the

‘reality’ of death” and safeguard us from its absolutely terminal significance by

“soften[ing] or deaden[ing] it in the realm of the symbolic,”lix in Derrida’s words.

Kermode argues that apocalypse does more than “soften” individuals’ “coarse”

engagement with time and death. It also helps cultures situate themselves within a larger

historical framework, linking the present to prophecies of the past and developments of

the future in order to banish the “intolerable idea that we live within an order of events

between which there is no relation, patter, mutability, or intelligible progression.”lx It is to

be expected that a society in transition, which has had its fundamental beliefs and

practices challenged, will construct end of days narratives and adopt apocalyptic views of

history. “[C]risis,” Kermode tells us, “is…a central element in our endeavors towards

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making sense of our world.”lxi Since no society is or has ever been at the “end of history”

—all are “in the middest,” in Kermode’s terms—a culture’s projections of the end must

be read as attempts to make what is occurring now coherent with what has gone before

and what is to come. The apocalypse should be understood as “immanent” rather than

“imminent” (even if some believe the latter to be true). My genealogy of American

apocalypticism demonstrates that this is the case: the Puritans, settling in an inhospitable

land, viewed their own lives through the lens of Revelation to connect their experiences

to God’s divine plan; the American nation-builders, struggling to shake the yoke of

Empire and transform disparate colonies into a unified state, interpreted themselves as the

apocalyptic fulfillment of the Enlightenment project; and Modernists, confronting the

demise of a previous model of society and the foundation of a new mode of being, saw

themselves as living at a decisive break in history, at the end of an era.

Kermode claims that it is only by imagining the end of the old—in the case of the

moderns, by projecting the demise of a way of life and social organization retrospectively

identifiable as “traditional,” or “premodern”—that one can hope to make sense of the

new. “Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition,” he argues, “the

absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty.”lxii Berger adds to this remark

that, “If apocalypse in its most radical form were to actually occur, we would have no

way even to recognize it, much less to record it.”lxiii Thus, although apocalyptic narratives

attempt to depict the radically other, the utterly dissimilar, the “not-yet,” they do so only

by employing well-worn tropes and figures. As Kermode notes, “The apocalyptic types—

empire, decadence and renovation, progress and catastrophe—are fed by history and

underlie our ways of making sense of the world from where we stand.”lxiv Apocalypticism

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is thus a strategy for re-inscribing continuity with the past in the face of a purported

rupture. It provides a totality in which the fragmentary, haphazard nature of the everyday

can be contextualized. Kermode regards apocalyptic narratives, and the conclusions of

these narratives in particular, as “objects in which everything is that exists in concord

with everything else, and nothing else is, implying that this arrangement mirrors the

dispositions of a creator, actual or possible.”lxv In his view, ends of narratives and

narratives of ends cannot help but invoke the notion of a Divine Plan, insofar as both

testify to some eternal (possibly unknowable) structure, which can underwrite reality and

grant significance and closure to human experience.

Kermode’s assessment—that apocalyptic narratives help both individuals and

societies “in the middest of time” deal with the brute immensity of time and the

inescapability of death and cultural change—seems to falter when we attempt to make

sense of the contemporary apocalyptic imagination. The application of his theses to The

Road raises more questions than answers: If apocalypticism is supposed to “humanize”

the enormity of the universe and the unceasing passage of the seasons, then what is the

reason for The Road’s continual meditation upon transience, upon concepts and objects

that will inevitably and irreparably vanish within the vast wastes of time? If a culture’s

end-times fantasies “limit the reality of death” by embedding it in the symbolic realm,

then why does McCarthy summon the spectre of cannibalism, an act that involves the

consumption, rather than the preservation, of one’s remains and memory after death,

which, in Jay Ellis’ view, “enacts a reversal in the ancient human progression to symbol,

to metaphor”?lxvi We return once more to the questions that began this investigation:

What is it that causes contemporary society to almost exclusively envision non-

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redemptive destruction? Whence does the pessimistic apocalyptic disposition emerge?

Section 3—“Barren, Silent, Godless”: Faithless Apocalypse?

Dewey contends that the shift from redemptive, truth-revealing apocalyptic

narratives to the “exhausted” narratives of today “parallels a wider, more complicated

cultural drift from God.”lxvii Up to a point, this assessment seems correct. Once it is no

longer conventional to believe and act as though the book of Revelation is divinely given

prophecy, the predictions of which would, at some real time in the future, come to pass, it

becomes more difficult to imagine that something akin to the kingdom of heaven — i.e. a

utopian, perfected world—could succeed an apocalyptic event. One can easily conclude:

if there is no benevolent, omnipotent God to guarantee the veracity of the unveiled truth

of reality and the perfection of the post-apocalyptic world-to-come, then there is little

reason to hope that a terminal scenario would result in revelation and rejuvenation.

The Road seems to substantiate the notion that irreligious apocalypses are

inherently nonredemptive. Waking from an unsettling dream to an environment of fallow

plains, petrified trees and cracked pavement, the father bemoans, “On this road there are

no godspoke men. They are gone…and they have taken with them the world.”lxviii In this

world, God is not only non-existant, (s)he is unspoken, unsignified. God’s disappearance

from the lips of men hollows language of meaning, depriving humans of the ability to

make sense of the world around them, let alone imagine the world-to-come. McCarthy

repeatedly emphasizes that this is an utterly unredeemable earth: anyone who would have

been capable of speaking of God is already dead. God’s loss affects more than just

thoughts and speech, it alters the earth itself: the narrator describes the land as “Barren,

silent, godless,”lxix with “secular winds.”lxx This passage implies either that a world

22

without God is essentially fruitless and opaque—presumably because there is no vital,

celestial force driving creation, no divine power bestowing voice and meaning upon raw

matter—or that an infertile, inhospitable, non-disclosing earth must also be godless. As

the old man the protagonists meet on the road states, “Where men cant live gods fare no

better.”lxxi

Despite McCarthy’s apparent corroboration of Dewey’s contention, there are

problems with citing a reduction in religion belief as an explanation for apocalyptic

pessimism. Contra Dewey, I suggest that the “drift from God” and “growing sense…that

the end of the world is a fiction”lxxii do not sufficiently account for the dejection of

contemporary apocalyptic fantasies. Firstly, because this alleged “drift,” if it exists, is

certainly not a recent phenomenon. Nietzsche’s madman announced the death of God in

1882,lxxiii an announcement he thought, even then, was long overdue. As I noted in the

preface, late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century American writers, theorists, and

politicians—even those paying lip service to religion—routinely acted as though humans,

not God, determined the course of history, yet their renderings of humanity’s final

destiny were consistently optimistic and utopian (with the notable exception of Poe).

Secondly, because it is debatable whether North American culture has “drifted”

away from God as Dewey suggests. After all, the United States is one of the most overtly

religious nations on earth. Not only do 9 in 10 Americans believe in God,lxxiv 31% believe

in a God who is angry, interventionist, and authoritarian.lxxv American schoolchildren still

pledge allegiance, every day, to “One Nation Under God” (with the words “under God”

only added in 1954). Evangelical Christian churches are immensely popular and wield

considerable political clout, forming a constituency that every major American politician

23

is obliged to court. One could argue that even though the people of the United States still

feel very close to God, American culture has distanced itself from overt religiosity—

however, such a contention is too vague, too open to dispute and questions of

methodology, to definitively account for contemporary apocalyptic pessimism.

Thirdly, if we accept Kermode’s argument that apocalyptic narratives inherently

envision an absolutely concordant universe, which is brought to an orderly, definitive

conclusion, then we must admit that even secular renditions of apocalypse invoke the

disposition of early Christian apocalyptics, who believed that “the benevolent might of

God the Creator control[ed] every spin of His planet; every action, every achievement,

every setback was part of his will.”lxxvi Whether one gives the name “God’s will” or the

“the way of the universe” to the totalizing order that underwrites the universal narrative is

a matter of semantics. It may be that contemporary apocalypse no longer evinces belief in

definitive conclusions or universal principles—which is exactly what I will be arguing

later in this paper—however, that matter is separate from the question of religiosity.

Finally, in spite of the apparent “godlessness” of its setting, The Road is pervaded

by religious references and themes, both explicit and implicit. A few obvious examples:

Even though the man purports to not believe in a deity, he regularly exclaims “Oh God!”

as an interjection,lxxvii and seems to cry out for divine assistance in times of need. The

narrator uses religious imagery to describe the boy,lxxviii and the father and son engage in

prayer on multiple occasions.lxxix McCarthy was himself raised a Roman Catholic and,

while not an outspoken believer like Flannery O’Connor, is by all accounts “a novelist of

religious feeling” who, although not beholden to dogma, “cannot stop wondering the

most passionate and honest way to give life meaning,”lxxx in the words of Robert Coles.

24

We cannot, therefore, attribute the recently arisen pessimistic tone in apocalypticism

solely to a decline of religious fervor, since it is far from apparent that religion is absent

from either American society or the contents of the text itself. Atheism does not entail

pessimism, just as belief in God does not necessitate hopefulness.

Section 4—Living in End Times: The Evolution of (Post) Apocalyptic Pessimism

If shifting attitudes towards God do not fully account for the pessimism of the

contemporary apocalyptic imagination, what is it that causes apocalypse to imply despair

where it once signaled hope? Derrida reminds us that “[b]reaks are always, and fatally,

re-inscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone.”lxxxi To answer

this question, we should thus interrogate when and why this revolution occurred, and

acquire a sense of the “cloth” from which today’s apocalypse is woven. As I indicated in

the preface, American literary apocalypse first began to consistently take on bleak tones

with the onset of Modernism. It is towards this period that I focus my next analysis.

Although thinkers had fantasized about a world governed by technology and

reason since the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, when these fantasies began to be

realized in the early twentieth-century, the result was hardly utopian. Malcolm Bradbury

and James McFarlane suggest that modernity was seen as an unprecedented, unsettling

break with history: “a crisis of reality, an apocalypse of cultural community.”lxxxii Fearing

that humanity was not only abandoning worthy traditions in favour of cheap modern

thrills, but also devaluing the dignity of human life and achievement, writers and theorists

of the modern period were “disposed to apocalyptic crisis-centered views of history,”lxxxiii

regarding their own era as a time of decadence and stagnation. The Modern world,

dominated by a “landscape of steam engines, automatic factories, railroads, vast new

25

industrial zones…[and] teeming cities that have grown over night,”lxxxiv seemed to have

literally paved over what came before, dissolving conventions and thrusting individuals

into a disconcerting environment mediated by machines and impersonal social controls.

I suggest that two distinctive features of modernity are to blame for this period’s

dejected apocalyptic views: 1) The apparent erasure of the past, and 2) The irremediable

estrangement of individuals from their society. These two facets of modern life, which

Frances Carey calls “cultural pessimism and social alienation,”lxxxv continue to affect

North American culture. Modernity deprived apocalypse of its optimism by seeming to

demonstrate that the principles humans long stood for, lived by, and believed, are

transient, forgettable and replaceable. It became clear that just as the cities of the modern

period drained the country of resources and population, the new mass culture chipped

away at folk customs, the Fordist production model superseded all earlier forms of

labour, and the urban bourgeoisie unsettled the power of old aristocrats, so all of the

triumphs of modernity could (and most likely would) be one day cast aside in turn. The

vast re-organizations of society, and the apparent strength of collective movements like

trade unionism, fascism and communism, gave the impression that individual deeds and

people are insignificant, gaining meaning only as components of larger projects. Derrida

describes this modern individualism as “relating to a role and not a person.”lxxxvi Even as

modernity atomized civil society, it deprived newly separated individuals of agency.

Though all became responsible for their own well being, few had the power to effect

change. The ravages of World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic, exacerbating the

agony caused by development, proved that transience is an inescapable feature of modern

life and death. These disasters established that not only is modern society able to dispose

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of people at an unprecedented rate, it can continue functioning after destruction,

developing over and in spite of that which is lost. The truth disclosed by modern

apocalypse—that the engine of progress will trample all in its inexorable advance—offers

no comfort to the living, no prospect of personal redemption, vindication, or reward.

Although contemporary apocalyptic pessimism descends from the modern period,

the nature of, and reasons for, our pessimism are different. Compared to today, modernist

construals of the apocalypse, though bleak, are somewhat reassuring: they hold that there

are universal truths, albeit bitter ones, which can be disclosed. Kermode’s theorization of

apocalypse—that it is a strategy people “in the middest” of time use to read their own

lifetime as part of a linear historical sequence with a beginning, middle and end—is able

to interpret American apocalyptic works of this era in a way that is not applicable to those

of the post-War period. To clarify this point, let us re-examine Steinbeck’s The Grapes of

Wrath. This work, which expresses the exhaustion and pessimism we ascertained to be

characteristic of both modern and contemporary visions of apocalypse, yearns for

resolutions to society’s ills. It evinces faith (though not without skepticism) that there

could be future solutions to present problems, and that as-yet unknown universals could

be discovered, which will make today’s fragments cohere.lxxxvii

In The Grapes of Wrath, although the “California dreams” of the Joads are

disappointed, hope remains that life will improve, if not for them, then at least for others

pushed into poverty by the economic apocalypse that was the Great Depression. While I

do not wish to suggest that Steinbeck’s work is unproblematically optimistic, as the final

scene does illustrate people, abandoned by the public, feeding upon each other in order to

survive, there is nothing in the novel to suggest that the desire for happiness, redemption

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and resolution is inherently flawed. On the contrary, Steinbeck valorizes such desires,

encouraging struggle against the political and economic forces that prevent progressive,

humanist aspirations from realization. His modernist apocalypse reveals the dangers of

naïve trust, tearing the veil off of the California golden coast and Roosevelt’s New Deal,

yet it preserves the virtue of expectation. Hopes are always in danger of disappointment,

individuals are always at risk of being lost in the mad shuffle of life, but this does not

mean that people should resign themselves to ruin. Rose of Sharon may birth a stillborn

baby, but she remains pregnant with desire for a just world. Although her breast milk

cannot feed the expected child, it still contains potential nourishment, which can supply

the hungry. Similarly, the apparatuses of modernity, though they yielded a flawed society

of exploitation and alienation, may yet be channeled for the betterment of all humanity.

I suggest that works like The Grapes of Wrath do not represent the onset of

modernity as an apocalypse, but as a harbinger. Modernist apocalypticism defers the end

of days to the future, regarding the present as “a period of perpetual transition,” which is

“elevated…into an 'age' or saeculum in its own right.”lxxxviii My reading of Steinbeck’s

work demonstrates that even as modernist apocalypse symptomatically reproduces the

“cultural pessimism” and “social alienation” of the era, revealing the modern world to be

apathetic and dehumanizing, on another level it soothes anxiety. By situating the crises

and social transformations of modernity within a progressive account of history—and by

projecting a possible end to the age of transition, when all of its crises can be resolved

and the vast potential of technological development realized—modern apocalypticism

gratifies what Kermode sees as “a need…to experience that concordance of beginning,

middle, and end.”lxxxix This experience of concordance allows modernity’s ruptures to be

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re-interpreted as temporary predicaments, solidifying the instability of a time of transition

and inscribing community where there were only fragments. Though the desire for

concordance is “harder than ever to satisfy,” as Kermode notes, because of modern

society’s “accumulated skepticism”xc towards positivistic narratives, this skepticism does

not undercut narrative’s ability to smooth over history’s ruptures, nor discredit humanism

as a viable ground for ethics, nor deprive apocalypse of emancipatory potential.

Whereas theorists like Kermode see apocalypticism as a hopeful, forward-looking

mode of discourse, which articulates desire for a coherent universe and faith in human

perfectibility, recent critics like James Berger deride modern and pre-modern apocalyptic

narratives as ideological and totalitarian. American apocalypticism in particular exhibits a

“weird blend of disgust, moral fervor, and cynicism,”xci espousing a “violent hatred for

the world as it is and violent desire for the world as it should be.”xcii In Berger’s view,

contemporary apocalyptic fantasies are not the rough sketches of a better tomorrow made

by people “in the middest,” but coping mechanisms, the symptoms of traumatic historical

events.xciii Always set after cataclysm, their intention is not to imagine a new, perfect

world, but to project the aftermath and decay of the current one. While writers of the

modern period sensed they were on the cusp of a major upheaval, that an apocalyptic day

of reckoning was soon to come, Berger suggests that in the late twentieth-century, there is

a strong feeling “that the conclusive catastrophe has already occurred, the crisis is over…

and the ceaseless activity of our time…is only a complex mode of stasis.”xciv We can

observe this belatedness in Gravity’s Rainbow, a work that epitomizes the postmodern

literary aesthetic. The novel obsesses over instances of “post-ness,” meditating upon how

the sound of the V-2 rocket trails behind its impact, and detailing Slothrop’s ability to

29

react to stimuli before they even occur. We can also detect it in the work of Jean

Baudrillard, who suggests that our world, no longer even real, is merely the mummified

corpse of a planet already denaturalized by capitalism and demolished by nuclear war:

“The explosion has already occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now.”xcv World

powers are immobilized and social movements made toothless by the threat of mutually

assured destruction. Recent visions of apocalypse thus become little more than the death

rattles of a civilization that has already come face-to-face with its own imminent

extinction.

The contemporary apocalyptic imagination holds that it is folly to even dream of a

disclosure of truth or zenith of history. Heffernan argues that “we live in a time…after

faith in a radically new world, of revelation, of unveiling,”xcvi a time that cannot believe in

apocalypse as the Puritans, positivists or modernists once did. This “inverted millenarian”

disposition is, strictly speaking, not apocalyptic—insofar as it rejects both imminent and

immanent “unveiling,” maintaining that there is nothing to be revealed, no redemption

after cataclysm—but post-apocalyptic. Post-apocalypse divulges only the inevitability of

oblivion, the impossibility of truth, and the idiocy of the past: as Daniel Bell puts it, “It

used to be that the great literary modifier was the word beyond... But we seem to have

exhausted the beyond, and today the… modifier is post.”xcvii To further elucidate the

difference between modernist apocalypse and contemporary post-apocalypse, it is useful

to contrast the archetypal modern environment —the newly developed industrial city—

with the setting of The Road. While old norms are effaced and past hopes betrayed in

both environments, McCarthy’s landscape is covered not by the steel and concrete

edifices of the city of tomorrow but by the ashes and ruins of the world of today. The

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contemporary American post-apocalypse radicalizes the anxieties of modernity, judging

our aging modern cities not as decadent but doomed; dreaming not about what new things

will come, but about how the old will cease to be; illustrating a time when, as Marx said

in a different context, “[a]ll that was solid melts into air, all that was holy is

profaned.”xcviii

What is the source of this dejection? How has the modern period’s pessimism

amplified to the point that apocalypse is no longer seen as potentially redemptive? What

is the “conclusive catastrophe” that is understood to have already occurred? Is there any

emancipatory potential to be found in contemporary (post) apocalyptic fantasies? I argue

that the post-apocalyptic lack of faith in closure, truth, and a better tomorrow derives

from three factors: 1) Skepticism towards humanism and progress, instigated by the

realization that humans are more likely to commit crimes against their species than

perfect it, more likely to destroy the earth than redeem it; 2) Postmodern culture, which

celebrates the simulacral dissolution of reality, the end of universals and meta-narratives;

and 3) Neoliberalism, today’s hegemonic economic ideology, political regimen, and

mode of cultural pedagogy, which, in advocating an utterly market-centric world-view,

declares the end of culture (including culturally constructed categories like race), society,

and any ethical system based on concern for others. Emerging after faith in human

perfectibility, belief in transcendence, and hope for political emancipation, contemporary

post-apocalyptic narratives are bleak not because old conventions and communities are

being replaced, but because they seem to terminate without substitution. They are

dejected not because humans are deprived of their former dignity, but because it is

supposed that life never had any worth in the first place and that no universal principles

31

can give order to existence. Under these circumstances, Heffernan explains, “Apocalypse

as the story of renewal and redemption is displaced by the post-apocalypse, where the

catastrophe has happened but there is no resurrection, no revelation. Bereft of the idea of

the end as direction, truth, and foundation, we have reached the end of the end.”xcix

I contend that each of these features of present-day North American is both cause

and symptom of post-apocalyptic pessimism. They are causes insofar as each disavows

any progressive interpretation of history or idealistic view of human destiny, promoting

instead a cynical, myopic brand of resignation, self-absorption and profit seeking, which

poses as pragmatism. They are symptoms insofar as all are predicated upon the alleged

prior demise of some long-held universal belief or meta-narrative (whether it be Man,

progress, universality, national sovereignty or social justice). Each bases its own premises

upon the presumption that the present is, in one way or another, post-apocalyptic.

In the following sections, I discuss how The Road symptomatically reproduces the

ends proclaimed by post-humanist skepticism and neoliberalism.c I argue that all of these

ends are fantasies, which obscure the operation of ideology and prevent people from

imagining alternatives to the current socio-politico-economic order. In the extreme post-

apocalyptic setting of The Road, however, it seems reasonable to suppose that many of

these ends would move out of the realm of fable and become actualized. Is there any way

to unsettle these fantasies? Can we think post-apocalypse otherwise? Despite

superficially replicating and naturalizing these post-apocalyptic presumptions, I suggest

that The Road subjects them to an immanent critique, demonstrating that concepts which

have been ostensibly damned by the failure of humanism and progress, debunked by

postmodernity, put to death by neoliberalism and extinguished by the unnamed

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catastrophe in McCarthy’s novel endure as traces. By demonstrating that none of these

purported terminations are complete, and that supposedly defunct concepts can recur in

different forms, not solely as reiterations of the same, The Road upsets the legitimacy of

these three doctrines, unsettling their foreclosure of alternatives. Destabilizing the

paradoxical finality of post-apocalyptic discourse, the novel gestures towards future

patterns of thought and modes of being which can perhaps go beyond, and not merely

come after, humanism, postmodernism and neoliberalism.ci

Section 5—The Ends of Humanism

Interpretations of the eschatological significance of human beings have always

underwritten visions of apocalypse.cii As I suggested earlier, one of the crucial differences

between contemporary post-apocalyptic works like The Road and modernist apocalyptic

narratives like The Grapes of Wrath, is in their differing dispositions towards humanism

and progress. For the modernists, humanism lay behind revelatory, redemptive visions of

apocalyptic disclosure. Humanity was an Archimedean point from which the world could

be investigated and transformed. Inspiring and vindicating technological, economic and

cultural development, “Man” was a universal principle that anchored reality and

“softened” the pain of death. The human essence was the ground of epistemology, the

foundation of ethics, and telos of history. Though individual humans die, “Man” lives on,

advancing as a species. Humanistic progress not only allowed people “in the middest” to

interpret time as a linear narrative with a harmonious beginning, middle, and end, it also

promised that this narrative would conclude triumphantly.

Today, we are not so certain that humanity has a particular destiny or essence, that

history is progressing towards some utopian future, or that there is any universal

33

community of humans whose existence and end can be explained through an apocalyptic

narrative. As Heffernan tells us, it is “not so much historiographical nihilism that

contributes to the [post-apocalyptic] doubt about apocalyptic narratives and an

investment in the end as it is a question of who makes up… the ‘human.’”ciii In the

aftermath of two World Wars, humanism has become a denigrated idea, while progress

smacks of an authoritarian disregard for difference. As Stefan Geroulanos observes:

“Once a foundation of knowledge, man was reconceived as a construct of science and technology, religion and history, cultural structure and political fashioning. Once the horizon of existence and thought, the human being became a self-doubting mystery lacking all existential or epistemic certainty other than its own death. Once an ethical criterion and a priority of secular, atheist, and egalitarian commitments, humanism now offered evidence of an imperialism supposedly inherent in modern political projects.”civ

We are no longer convinced that the notion of “the human” is even definable, let alone

capable of underwriting our experience of reality.cv Hence, rather than dream of a time

when humanity will realize its potential and spread peace and prosperity across the

planet, Foucault yearns for a future when Man will no longer exist as a model and wash

away “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.”cvi Gilles Deleuze, for his part,

suggests that this momentous dissolution of Man has already occurred, in that the concept

of humanity is ultimately groundless, substanceless, unable to withstand scrutiny: “Man

did not survive God,”cvii he declares. The demise of humanism, and its attendant faith in

human potential and progress, is one of the reasons contemporary post-apocalyptic

narratives are so cynically dismissive of the possibility of a better world. Although

humanism is not necessarily an optimistic, progressive doctrine (Foucault reminds us it

“is a theme or set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time,”cviii

which can take on diverse forms), it does presume that humans have some unique

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significance and power to affect their environment. When one has neither faith in

humanity nor faith in God, it is difficult, if not impossible, to believe in a revelatory or

redemptive apocalypse. As an alternative, belief in the physical universe, which is utterly

indifferent to our affairs, offers few comforts and little promise of unveiling.cix

What effects do the purported ends of humanism and progress have upon The

Road? I contend that McCarthy both directly (through explicit references) and in-directly

(through allusive motifs) invokes the spectres of historical events, like the dawn of the

nuclear age and the Shoah, responsible for overturning belief in human progress and

perfectibility. He also presents a humanity without humanism: a species without purpose,

dignity or destiny, whose sole concern is bare survival. By doing so, he apparently

reproduces and confirms a supposition of contemporary post-apocalyptic narratives: that

human existence is irredeemable, traumatized, beyond repair.

Despite constructing a scenario in which human life has been pushed to the brink

and the possibility of improvement seems unfeasible, I argue that McCarthy ultimately

sets the stage for the return of humanism and progress. Although The Road acknowledges

that great catastrophes have occurred, which challenge our capacity to believe that human

life is special and human society improvable, its motifs and meditations suggest that

humanism and belief in progress should not (and cannot) be scrapped altogether. It

portrays disasters that seem to put these two notions into disrepute as manageable, if not

surmountable. The protagonists overcome both painful historical inheritances and

personal experiences of trauma, adapting to their conditions, and accumulating

knowledge, skills, and resources for a future that is unknown, but potentially restorative.

Representing a desperate, hopeless hope for a better tomorrow that persists against all

35

odds, McCarthy demonstrates that, under the direst of circumstances, human life can

regain a measure of worth and promise, and expectations of doom can turn revelatory.

In The Road, all peoples and creatures have been subjected to a holocaust, remains

are far more common than living beings, and the detritus of an all-consuming fire

contaminates seemingly the entirety of the earth. The remnant of whatever reduced the

landscape to a wasteland, “[s]oft ash”cx permeates every inch of the novel’s setting.

Calling to mind the fallout of a nuclear explosion and the cinders of bodies burned in the

Nazi death camps, this motif alludes to historical events that undermined the efficacy of

humanism and progress by seemingly devaluing the dignity of human life, cheapening

the power of human reason, and dimming prospects for the future. I further suggest that

the unnamed disaster that produced this omnipresent ash alludes to these two occurrences

in particular, and, more generally, acts as a synecdoche for all traumatic historical events,

which cast doubt on the significance of humanity and gesture towards a bleak future.

Though McCarthy does not specify the nature of the calamity, the state of the

environment in the text is highly reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s “nuclear winter” scenario,

as many critics have noted. According to Sagan et al, a large-scale nuclear war would

send enough ash and dust into the atmosphere to blot out the sun and induce frigid,

winter-like conditions on the crust for months, if not years. Under such circumstances,

photosynthesis would not occur, causing plants to wither and all life on earth (or, best

case scenario, all life within the affected hemisphere) to die from lack of food. cxi The

setting of The Road fits this account almost perfectly: the environment is “[c]old and

growing colder,”cxii the sky “dark beyond darkness,”cxiii trees are “charred and

limbless,”cxiv and the landscape is “raw,”cxv devoid of flora or fauna. The few surviving

36

people in this icy wasteland are always hungry, ever on the verge of starvation. The ash

has completely modified the climate: instead of a water cycle, there is what we might call

an “ash cycle.” The father and son shelter themselves from ashy snow and “rain of

drifting soot,”cxvi and, on one occasion, witness a “grey squall line of ash.”cxvii In the only

flashback scene that provides illumination about the cause of the catastrophe, the man

witnesses a “long sheer of light and then a series of low concussions” and a “dull rose

glow in the window glass,”cxviii which could very well be signs of a nuclear detonation.cxix

The spectres of nuclear war and nuclear winter cannot be exorcised from the text.cxx

Similarly conjured by the image of ever-present ash, the Shoah is another phantasm

that looms over the novel. The “[b]lack water running from under the sodden drifts of

ash”cxxi that the father and son observe in a riverbank is uncannily similar to the ash ponds

at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the death camp’s overseers deposited cinders from the

millions of gas chamber victims. The ash that billows through the air and rains down upon

the protagonists in The Road evokes images of the soot and smoke that would belch from

the crematoria chimneys and fall upon communities near the camps. The father and son

flee from sanctuary to sanctuary like Jews living in hiding, eventually taking on the

characteristics of concentration camp inmates themselves. Both are painfully skinny, with

unkempt clothes and a bedraggled appearance. Observing his son’s “[t]aut face and hollow

eyes,”cxxii the father suggests that the boy “looked like something out of a deathcamp.

Starved, exhausted, sick with fear.”cxxiii Throughout the novel, the protagonists encounter

heaps of clothes, shoes and other possessions, which call to mind the piles of valuables and

garments stripped from victims of the gas chambers. In one burnt-out city, they come

across a pile of corpses with “all their shoes… long since stolen,”cxxiv invoking the Nazis’

37

theft of shoes and other valuables from their murder victims. Similarly, when the father

and son enter a house where cannibals lure and imprison hapless victims, they discover “a

great heap of clothing… Clothes and shoes. Belts. Coats. Blankets and old sleeping

bags.”cxxv The survivors of The Road’s cataclysm live like the prisoners of a death camp,

labouring constantly, suffering from gnawing hunger and trenchant fear, waiting to be

ushered into the killing rooms where all hopes die, where all dreams are burned to ash.

Ever since the World War II, the threats of nuclear war and industrialized genocide

have shaken humanism to its core, dramatically altering conceptions of apocalypse. It

was still possible for the modernists to believe in human perfectibility and progress, to

envision apocalypse as potentially revelatory and redemptive, because nuclear weapons

had not been invented and the concept of a “death camp” did not yet exist. Nuclear war,

nuclear winter, and the Auschwitz gas chambers each represent an apocalypse without

disclosure, without the prospect of a post-apocalyptic utopia. All that these past and

projected calamities reveal is the transience of life, the depths of human cruelty, and the

apathy of existence. Nuclear war simply cannot be interpreted as a battle between good

and evil, fought for the salvation of humankind. It is an event without victors, which turns

each and every person, both living and unborn, into a victim. Making a lie of progress, it

indicts science for pushing our species to the brink of suicide and dismisses progressive

attempts at societal improvement. If atomic blasts will inevitably consume the globe, then

there is no reason to even attempt to better human civilization. Similarly, by turning

seemingly every technological, bureaucratic, and philosophical development of “Western

Civilization” towards one purpose—the annihilation of all lives deemed unworthy of life

—the Shoah disgraces humanistic philosophy. As Mr. White, a character in The Sunset

38

Limited, a play McCarthy released in the same year as The Road, asserts: “Western

Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau.”cxxvi There is no

apparent way to bring these events into accord with a progressive narrative of human

history, or to reconcile them with a belief in the innate value of human life. In their wake,

humanistic thoughts, deeds, and values are exposed as folly, fancies of human destiny are

seared away, and all apocalypses are made barren.

While it is still reasonable to assume that humanity could recover, learn from its

mistakes, and create a better future for itself after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after

Auschwitz—albeit, with a revaluation of politico-ethical priorities—under the conditions

McCarthy describes, progress seems to be out of the question and humanism seems an

unthinkable worldview. In The Road, the whole human world is reduced to cinders,

seemingly beyond resurrection. When the father and son explore a town, they find no

people, just “[f]ossil tracks in the dried sludge…The only thing that moved in the streets

was the blowing ash.”cxxvii Humanity has gone the way of the dinosaur and become a mere

fossil, an assembly of rocks and relics. It has been supplanted by residue, the

characteristics of which shed grim light upon the nature of human existence in the

absence of the reassuring doctrine of humanism. Ash is, by nature, generic, virtually

unidentifiable. When burned to cinders, any uniqueness once possessed by a person or

object vanishes. Lacking self-determination, ash is “carried on the bleak and temporal

winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again.”cxxviii

Nuclear war, genocide, and The Road’s disaster reduce human life to ash, depriving it of

individuality and agency. The fact that the novel’s narrator does not reveal any of the

characters’ names, and that the only person in the text who provides a name—“Ely,” the

39

old prophet of doom encountered on the road—declares the title he gives himself to be a

fake,cxxix draws our attention to the post-apocalyptic loss of human individuality. In the

nuclear age, the post-Holocaust world, humans are shown to be subject to the volitions of

powers beyond themselves, liable to be destroyed or “scattered” at any given time.

The threat of nuclear war, genocide, and universal catastrophe endanger more than

just the innate value of human life. Human hopes for the future are similarly put in

jeopardy by these threats, as the motif of ash, the physical trace of The Road’s unnamed

disaster, demonstrates. McCarthy describes ash clouds obscuring the sun, causing it to

appear as a “vague gray light,”cxxx which only barely brightens the dismal sky. The ash’s

adumbration of daylight alludes to the dimming of hope that follows humanism’s death

by atomic fire and Zyklon B. In this world, there is little to look forward to: the sun will

not come out tomorrow. The darkness that envelops the dim landscape each dusk almost

completely effaces the residual traces of human existence, causing cities to “[vanish] in

the night’s onset like…apparition[s],”cxxxi making the fire and lamps of the protagonists

appear as “little more than…mote[s] of light.”cxxxiiThe father’s greatest wish, other than

for the wellbeing of his son, is for the days to become lighter and the sun to return: “He

hoped it would be brighter where for all he knew the world grew darker daily.”cxxxiii The

homonymy between son and sun suggests that there is a connection between the father’s

desire for sunlight and his wish for a better world for his child. Both of these desires will

likely be unsatisfied. On many occasions, the man wakes from slumber and immediately

“look[s] for light in the east,” only to discover, each and every time, that “there [is]

none.”cxxxiv He finds only an “ashen daylight congeal[ing] over the land,”cxxxv which

afflicts him “[l]ike the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”cxxxvi

40

Although the father considers using a lightmeter to test if the sky is getting lighter or

darker and thereby ascertain if the planet is in the process of recovery or decline, he never

does so.cxxxvii Unwilling to speculate about the future in the wake of disaster, the father

refuses to make predictions about the prospect of progress, resigning himself to the

finality of the unnamed catastrophe and busying himself instead with the task of everyday

survival.

In the figure of the father, McCarthy presents us an image of humanity without

visionary power. The man apprehends his own lack of faith as a malady, blindness. He

knows himself to be damaged by the trauma of watching civilization crumble before his

eyes and cannot help but regard any progress, outside of slow, painful steps on the road,

as impossible. He “mistrust[s]” his own dreams when they are pleasant and hopeful,

believing that “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was

the call of languor and of death.”cxxxviii When he has a dream that is “rich in color” and

imbued with utopian promise, all it takes is a quick look at his barren surroundings to

banish it from his mind: “Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like

certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to day.”cxxxix Fantasies

of comfort and progress are antiquated, out of touch with the realities of life after people.

The post-apocalyptic nightmare that survivors of the cataclysm awaken to produces

more symptoms than just a “cold glaucoma,” which obscures powers of vision. It also

affects humans’ ability to reason and remember. When the father notices that “[o]ne of

the front wheels of the cart had gone wonky,” he shrugs it off as unchangeable: “What to

do about it? Nothing. Where all was burnt to ash before them… and the nights were long

and cold beyond anything they’d yet encountered.”cxl The unthinking resignation the man

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evinces is reminiscent of the attitudes holocaust survivors describe as having been

pervasive in the Nazi death camps, real world sites “where all was burnt to ash.” Arthur

Cohen tells us that, “The death camps…by their very nature, obliterate thought and the

human program of thinking.”cxli When destruction is each person’s unavoidable destiny,

knowledge becomes impossible. All paradigms collapse. Living in a bleak environment,

like the inmates of Auschwitz, where the threat of extermination by starvation or violence

is ubiquitous, the man is disturbed to discover that “[h]is mind was betraying him.”cxlii He

cannot remember the names of objects, he forgets the appearance of all hues save shades

of gray, and cannot recall what bygone foods looked and tasted like: “The names of

things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to

eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true.” cxliii Very little seems to survive

post-apocalyptic amnesia, and the man bemoans that his memories and thoughts are

“[m]ore fragile than he would have thought.”cxliv He concludes that all knowledge is

hollow, that there is “[n]o list of things to be done,”cxlv no standards by which to judge

one’s actions or adjust one’s thoughts.cxlvi The fragmentary nature of the novel’s

sentences, which often omit words and clauses grammar dictates ought to be included,

reflects this end time condition of lawlessness and irrationality.

Not only does there seem to be nothing “to correct for” in the post-apocalypse, it is

also as though there is nothing for which to work. Human inventions have become

purposeless, valueless. “Expensive electronic equipment,” now unfunctional, is “left

unmolested on the shelves,”cxlvii while “Electrical appliances, furniture. Tools” are

“scattered by the side of the road.”cxlviii The discarding of tools is particularly significant,

because for a long time the use of tools was regarded as what separates humanity from

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animals.cxlix By making tools and human creations redundant, the world of The Road

seems to void everything that once made humans unique. If there is no reason or purpose,

“no list of things to be done,” then why should the protagonists continue to suffer? Why

not succumb to death and commit suicide, as the boy’s mother does? Or alternatively,

why not become wholly bestial, regard survival at any cost as a good in itself and resort

to cannibalism and savagery, as others in the text elect to do?

Entombed within a world of ash, losing the ability to hope, reason and remember,

the protagonists at times seem close to losing their humanity altogether. The man often

resorts to animal-metaphors in his speech and thoughts, stating, during a downpour, that

the pair “stood in the rain like farm animals.”cl Like domesticated creatures bred to die,

they seem incapable of changing their living conditions, able to do little more with their

lives than kill time before slaughter. McCarthy uses an animal simile to illustrate the

dreary toil of human existence in the post-apocalyptic world when, describing the grim

progress of the pair upon the road, he writes, “They went on. Treading the dead world

under like rats on a wheel.”cli This fear—that, in the absence of any meaning or destiny,

the human life span will become a mere drudgery, as tedious and directionless as a rodent

running in a wheel—runs throughout the text. The narrator routinely describes the two

characters as animals, at one point calling them “two hunted animals trembling like

groundfoxes in their cover.”clii In a constant state of anxiety, labouring to satisfy basic

needs for food, water and shelter, and fleeing from perceived threats, the protagonists, in

many ways, become like hunted animals. In the father’s view, all other humans appear

similarly inflected by animality. He detects “reptilian calculations” in the eyes of a

“roadagent” encountered on the road, “the first human being other than the boy that he’d

43

spoken to in more than a year.” The man regards his interlocutor as a beast whose gaunt,

conniving appearance gives the impression of “an animal inside a skull looking out the

eyeholes.”cliii Unable to reason in any manner other than a “reptilian,” instinctual drive for

self-preservation, survivors of the catastrophe have lost something long thought to be

distinctly human: the ability to respond ethically to others. Though the animalization of

humans is a common trope in McCarthy’s fiction—Robert Brinkmeyer suggests it “is the

fate of…characters who cross the fragile boundary separating the civilized from the

uncivilized”cliv—in The Road it takes on a particular urgency. When there is no boundary

to delineate the “civilized” and “uncivilized,” no humanistic philosophy to grant Homo

sapiens a purpose and proper, and no prospect for progress, can anyone be fully human?

What, if anything, separates the protagonists from the “reptilian” man whose teeth are

“Claggy with human flesh. Who has made of the world a lie every word”?clv

I suggest that the formal features of The Road and the actions of the protagonists

illustrate a fervent, though unacknowledged, faith in the dignity and future of humankind.

Despite appearances to the contrary, the author does not illustrate the ends of humanism

and progress, but the transformation of these concepts in the face of dramatic change. As

I will show, McCarthy demonstrates that the meanings of humanity and progress are not

so much static as open to continual re-contextualization and reinterpretation. In a certain

sense, it is true that humanism and progress as we know them have come to a conclusion:

in the aftermath of the nuclear age, genocide, and The Road’s unnamed disaster, post-

Enlightenment, modernist construals of these notions are no longer viable. Much of what

was believed about humanism and progress depended on the continuity of a “modern”

way of life and an anthropocentric ontology. That being said, one cannot leap to the

44

conclusion that these concepts have come to a complete end. To make a firm declaration

of conclusion is to foreclose the possibility of uncovering a re-iteration or rejuvenation,

and to unthinkingly affirm, over and above all possible contradictions and complications,

that the future can only be a repetition of the same. I argue that, rather than illustrate a

non-disclosive, remainderless termination, what the apparent representations of the end of

humanism and progress in The Road actually imply is that the only way to preserve some

unique significance for human existence, to retain hope for progressive improvement, and

to even remain human in the wake of major upheaval is to abandon fixed expectations of

each of these concepts’ connotation and future significance. Just because a term no longer

means what it once did does not entail that it is referent-less. In the remainder of this

section, I demonstrate how each of the ostensible ends of humanism and progress in The

Road represent the beginning of a new, as yet unrecognizable, iteration of these terms,

suggesting that McCarthy indefinitely defers the dissolution of humanism and progress.

There can be no denying that, by raising the spectre of self-imposed annihilation,

the threat of nuclear war calls both human exceptionalism and the doctrine of progress

into question, forecasting for humanity not a utopian destiny of justice, peace and

universal concordance, nor even a continuation of the current way of life, but a dead

future, as peaceful as the grave. Nevertheless, McCarthy shows that nuclear paranoia has

the potential to lead to something other than nihilism and despair. He draws our attention

to a constructive aspect of the threat of nuclear war when, on the verge of starvation, The

Road’s protagonists take refuge in fully stocked bomb shelter. The man regards it as a

mixed blessing. A symbol of humanity’s expectation of its own imminent doom, the

bunker is a reminder of the unavoidability of loss and ruin, from which he is eager to

45

depart.clvi For the son however, the bunker is paradisiacal, akin to some ancient treasure

trove, containing all “[t]he richness of a vanished world.”clvii He does not want to leave,

telling his father, “I wish we could live here.”clviii The shelter illustrates how the prospect

of utter devastation can, in a different context, contribute to the preservation of humanity.

When the boy asks why the bunker was there, the man replies “because someone thought

it might be needed.”clix If the threat of nuclear carnage did not loom over the United

States, the shelter would not have been built and the pair would likely starve. Recognition

of future dangers can potentially motivate humanity to prevent and prepare for the worst.

The shelter’s success—completely unharmed by the disaster, it provides the protagonists

with ample food and shelter—proves that, given adequate warning, humans are capable

of mitigating the consequences of catastrophe,clx even one as devastating as McCarthy

imagines. Nuclear weapons force us to use speculative fictions (such as Sagan’s nuclear

winter scenario and, perhaps, The Road itself)clxi to assist in making provisions for the

future.clxii Although the old man ridicules people for “always getting ready for tomorrow”

when “[t]omorrow wasn’t getting ready for them,”clxiii the novel repeatedly demonstrates

the value of forethought, suggesting that preparation may be all that keeps humanity from

extinction.clxiv While bomb shelters, on one hand, signify the demise of humanism, the

breakdown of society, and the rise of an individualistic survivalist mentality, on the other,

they represent hope that people may survive the worst of conditions, in spite of all.

Though it alludes to the Shoah and the aftermath of nuclear war, and illustrates the

erasure of identity and agency, in McCarthy’s novel, ash is more than just a sign of death.

I suggest that this motif contain the suggestion of both ruin and renewal, or, perhaps

more accurately, of ruin as renewal. This implication can be unpacked by examining its

46

significance within Catholicism. Catholics use ashes most notably on the solemn fast Ash

Wednesday, the first day of Lent, when the celebrant marks the foreheads of the faithful

with ashes made from the burned palm branches of the previous year’s Palm Sunday.clxv

Ashes in this context are symbolic of penitence for one’s sinsclxvi prior to God’s

deliverance of humanity during the Easter season. McCarthy emphasizes this sacral

dimension of ash when the narrator describes an ashy snowflake falling upon the heads of

the characters as “the last host of Christendom.”clxvii The host is the body of Christ,

offered as a sacrifice to take away the sin of the world. The massive catastrophe that

McCarthy envisions, which immures all bodies in the novel with ash, can be understood

through a Catholic lens as a massive penitential sacrifice, which, though it appears to

cause nothing but destruction and death, ultimately redeems the whole human world. It is

worth recalling that ash, used for millennia to make soap, does not just stain, it cleanses.

Not content to be buried or blinded by it, the protagonists learn to live with the ash

and other remnants of the dead world. The man uses “two old brooms” to turn the cart

into a sled, which is able to skim above the debris, expedite their progress, and entertain

his son: “It was the first time he’d seen the boy smile in a long time.”clxviii Even an

immense disaster cannot rule out the possibility of having fun, or of turning potential

impediments into opportunities for innovation. The boy uses ash to forecast the weather:

when he “thought he smelled ash on the wind,” he responds with appropriate preparation,

assembling bits of plywood into “a rickety leanto”clxix in order to make a shelter from the

expected rain. For the son at least, ash is not just a symbol of the past, it is a sign of future

transformation. Although ash is a trace of something else, it does not itself allow other

traces to appear. “Tracks don’t stay in the ash.” The boy reminds the man. “You said so

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yourself. The wind blows them away.”clxx Like the boy himself, the grounding of ash

provides a tabula rasa upon which humanity can construct a new world: should the

climate improve, the ashy soil would be exceptionally fertile. McCarthy alludes to this

life-giving aspect of ash when he describes the pair finding a colony of mushrooms,

“morels.”clxxi Morels grow on ash after forest fires. After they die, morels’ remains return

nutrients to the soil, preparing the way for new growth.clxxii In The Road, they are the first

sign of new vegetation, providing the pair with nourishment in the short-term, and hope

for the land’s eventual rejuvenation in the long-term. Ash is thus not indicative of

irreparable loss and perpetual ruin, but of new beginnings and eventual re-growth.

Having shown that, far from indicating the hopelessness and insignificance of

human existence, motifs in The Road that invoke nuclear war and genocide illustrate

restoration after cataclysm, I now demonstrate how the apparent loss of knowledge and

animalization of people in McCarthy’s text lay the groundwork for a re-iteration of

humanism and progress. Although he claims to feel “betrayed” by his mind, to have

forgotten much of what he once knew, the man still retains a vast reservoir of knowledge.

He continually inventories the pair’s supplies, ensuring that they always have enough

provisions to make it through the next day.clxxiii When confronted by the “reptilian”

roadagent, he threatens him with sophisticated physical and anatomical facts, stating, “the

bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it

you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like collicus and temporal gyrus and

you wont have them anymore.”clxxiv This passage demonstrates that the catastrophe did

not rob the father of wisdom, only of faith that his learning is valuable. Perhaps it is only

right for him to feel that human reason has committed a “betrayal,” in light of its misuse

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during the invention of nuclear weapons and organization of genocide. Almost every

scene in the novel depicts the man putting his incredibly varied skills and knowledge to

practical use, preserving the lives of his son and himself. One example: although he

initially evinces resignation about the damaged cart wheel, suggesting that there is

“nothing to do”, just two pages later, he accumulates “a handrill…a hacksaw,”clxxv and

repairs it, putting on a display of engineering skill, “while the boy sat watching

everything.”clxxvi Even in the face of utter annihilation, the man retains a scientific attitude

and yearns to investigate the physical world, musing, “Perhaps in the world’s destruction

it would be possible at last to see how it was made.”clxxvii Not only does McCarthy prove

the father’s knowledge to be viable and relevant, he shows human inventions to be

durable, outliving their makers. When the pair come across a dam, the son asks: “Will the

dam be there for a long time?” His father replies: “I think so… It will probably be there

for hundreds of years. Thousands even.”clxxviii The entirety of the novel is spent travelling

on one of the greatest engineering feats in human history: the American interstate

highway system. It is only in the absence of civilization that the lasting significance of

human innovation can be appreciated. Even though “natural” entities have almost wholly

disappeared—the dam’s lake is empty of fish, the roadside devoid of flora and fauna—

human creations persist as monuments to the species’ past splendor.

In contrast to McCarthy’s earlier novels, where “[b]ecoming bestial is the fate of…

characters who cross the…boundary separating the civilized from the uncivilized,”clxxix as

Brinkmeyer suggests, in The Road it seems that the only way for the protagonists to

retain their humanity and stay alive is to take on animal qualities. While searching for

supplies, the father “leav[es] the boy to sleep under the tree like some hibernating

49

animal,”clxxx and “train[s] him to lie in the woods like a fawn,”clxxxi so that he will not be

spotted by roaming predators. The father finds water like a dog, using his sense of

smell.clxxxii When using a bucket on a string to collect water from a subterranean tank, the

narrator describes the pair as “crouched over the tank like apes fishing with sticks in an

anthill,”clxxxiii associating tool-usage not with people, but with apes. Animality is shown as

both prior to humanity and a necessary condition for humanity. By assuming animal

attributes, the protagonists not only acquire important skills for survival, they also gain

comfort in the cold, inhuman wilderness. Early in the novel, when short on supplies, the

father is pleased to note that “[t]he boy had found some crayons and painted his facemask

with fangs and…trudged on uncomplaining.”clxxxiv By adopting the visage of a beast, the

son imbues himself with enough feigned ferocity to ward off the terror that surely stalks

him while upon the road. Animality becomes a paradigm through which the father

imagines his son’s experience of reality.clxxxv He describes the boy, licking sweet syrup off

the lid of a tin of prunes, as “a cat licking its own reflection in a glass.”clxxxvi The son

represents a new breed of person, one lacking the self-doubt and cynicism so

characteristic of modern man,clxxxvii whose first instinct is to greet others with affection.

The Road does not merely reproduce examples of a post-apocalyptic re-iteration

and renewal of humanism—it performs this renewal. Critics have observed a tension in

McCarthy’s fiction between the worlds he imagines and the words he uses to represent

them. Noting that McCarthy invariably employs a “highly stylized, manmade literary

practice” to illustrate environments indifferent to human concerns and customs, Georg

Guillemin contends that his novels embody “a stalemate between humanist discourse and

post-humanist idea.”clxxxviii One place we can detect this “stalemate” is in the plethora of

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adjectives—e.g. the numerous variations of gray: “granitic,”clxxxix “gunmetal,”cxc “charcoal

sketches”cxci etc.— McCarthy uses to portray the novel’s drab, monochromatic setting.

Another place is in the novel’s presentation and pagination: though the appearance of the

text is barren and pervaded by blankness, suggesting a literary work on the verge of

disappearance and irrelevance, its fontcxcii hearkens to the most canonical work in all of

English literature, Shakespeare’s Folio. Contra Guillemin, I suggest that the apparent

discrepancy in The Road between the text’s richly allusive, humanistic narrative form and

barren, dehumanized content is not a “stalemate,” which implies that the two are locked

in permanent opposition, but a dialectic. The decline and fall of civilization in the novel’s

world offers an opportunity for McCarthy’s “highly stylized, manmade literary practice”

to make a barren, inhuman wasteland grist for the mill of human imagination. By using a

variety of literary strategies—including detailed descriptions of everyday minutiae,

dreams, flashbacks, philosophical mediations, impromptu rituals, and eschatological

visions—to describe a world “shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities,”cxciii

McCarthy performs humanism’s sublation of its own demise, illustrating narrative’s

triumph over nihilism. In doing this, he heeds a maxim of the father, who advises: “When

you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”cxciv

In this section, I have attempted to accomplish three things: 1) Demonstrate that the

ostensible end of humanism and progress is partially responsible for the “exhaustion” so

characteristic of contemporary (post) apocalyptic narratives. 2) Show how the apparent

termination of humanism and progress reverberates throughout The Road. 3) Suggest that

features of McCarthy’s novel, which apparently signify this termination, actually reveal

the re-iteration and renovation of these concepts. The end has not arrived, the apocalypse

51

of humanism and progress is, in the words of Umberto Eco, postponed.cxcv In times of

great crisis, belief in some sort of humanism and progress is necessary, if only to prevent

people from opting to despair (like the old man), commit suicide (like the mother), or

treat self-preservation at any cost as superior to all other injunctions (like the roadagents).

The humanism of The Road is not predicated upon the existence of some pure form of

humanity. As I have demonstrated, the protagonists’ humanity is both inflected by and

dependent upon animal qualities. The father and son witness the worst of human cruelty

and nature’s apathy, yet continue to “carry the fire,”cxcvi and uphold belief in some

semblance of human dignity and destiny.cxcvii They represent a humanity that affirms itself

without resorting to exceptionalism or obstinacy. Progress does not manifest in the novel

as limitless growth or technological advancement. It is not a sequential progression

towards some predictable goal or horizon. It instead appears in the trope of the slow,

painful journey, the end of which is necessarily unforeseeable and indeterminable.

Improvement, which transforms the nature of the journey itself, is accomplished step

after agonizing step. Rather than seek silver bullets or technological resolutions to the

problems of contemporary society, we should seek hope in small acts of determination in

the present, which work to prepare a future that can, in the name of justice, build upon the

ruins of the past and make out of its inheritance something new.

Section 6—The Ends of Neoliberalismcxcviii

Socio-political conditions have always had a profound effect on visions of

apocalypse.cxcix The mixture of skeptical attitudes towards the present and optimistic

views of the future that is so typical of modernist apocalypses reflects the socio-economic

conditions of that age. Zygmunt Bauman refers to the early twentieth-century as a period

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of “solid modernity”—solid insofar as once pre-modern society was swept away, “the

Fordist model…of industrialization, accumulation and regulation” operated as “an

epistemological building site on which the whole world-view was erected and from

which it towered… over the totality of living experience.”cc The Fordist assembly line

was the locus of trade unionism, which promoted a spirit of collective action and public

responsibility; the manufacturing sector provided steady, well-paying middle-class jobs;

governments implemented strong social programs to protect the vulnerable; and society

as a whole seemed to move in a definable direction. By contrast, today, in what Bauman

calls “liquid modernity,”cci public solidarity is lacking, we are alienated from each other

by technology and corporate culture; citizens are politically detached and self-interested,

preferring personal profit over collective benefit; labour “flexibility,” meaning work

without benefits or stability, is the norm; the poor are left to fend for themselves; and

society seems directionless, incapable of major undertakings. Contemporary apocalypses

—which offer not revelation, but fragmentation; not post-apocalyptic utopia but a bellum

omnium contra omnes; not a “final judgment” of the human world, but a breakdown of

the ethical—reproduce this liquid modern, neoliberal political climate.

David Harvey defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices

that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual

entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by

strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”ccii Promoting the unfettered

enclosure of public assets, fragmenting society into an aggregate of “entrepreneurial”

individuals, and supplanting ethical responsibility with an individualistic, Social

Darwinist market logic, neoliberalism amplifies the “social alienation” of modernity and

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makes it into a politico-economic policy, which has become utterly hegemonic in the

world today. cciii A willfully amnesic ideology that presents itself as “post-ideological,”cciv

neoliberalism declares an end to the emancipatory political projects of the twentieth

century,ccv emptying civil rights discourses of their content and dismantling social safety

nets. It instigates what Henry Giroux calls “a shift away from the goals of living a life of

dignity…and a move towards the much more deadly task of struggling to stay alive.”ccvi

Whereas political theories like socialism imagined how an ideal state could provide for

all, neoliberalism “abandon[s] citizens to their own cunning and guts.”ccvii Acting as the

ideological foundation for a corporate pedagogical apparatus, which, Giroux argues,

“largely cancels out or devalues gender, class-specific, and racial injustices of the

existing social order,”ccviii neoliberalism presents itself as a pragmatic mode of politics

that emerges after “old” concepts like race, the social, and the ethical have become

bankrupt.

I argue that, despite taking place in world that lacks any political system to speak

of, The Road reproduces many of the presuppositions of neoliberalism, illustrating an

environment where issues of race have been effaced; where society has been replaced by

clusters of “entrepreneurial” individuals; and where feelings of ethical responsibility

based on care for the other have become unthinkable. By showing these premises to

persist without the influence of culture, The Road seems to naturalize them,ccix vindicating

and realizing neoliberal fantasies of the end of race, society, and ethics.

Susan Searls-Giroux informs us that, under neoliberalism, “race comes to assume

an underground existence. Coded culturally or individually, targeted populations are

“raceless,” in that they are no longer racially identified”ccx Race vanishes, not because it

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has disappeared as a concept, nor because people are treated with equality irrespective of

skin colour, but because it is simply not acknowledged in mainstream political discourse.

Neoliberalism, David Theo-Goldberg notes, exhibits a “colour-blind” racism, which

“transforms, via the negating dialectic of denial and ignoring, racially marked social

disorders into racially erased ones.”ccxi When individuals are defined as economic free

agents, wholly responsible for their own actions and living conditions, histories of racial

oppression and patterns of race-based discrimination go unrecognized.ccxii

The world of The Road is truly “colour-blind” in the manner that Searls-Giroux

and Theo-Goldberg describe, effacing race even more effectively than neoliberal political

discourse. McCarthy’s physical descriptions of characters are so bare that he does not

even describe people’s skin colour, meaning that the narration itself is “colour-blind.”

Though the protagonists spend the entirety of the novel roaming through the Old South,

they never meditate upon the legacy of slavery or segregation, even when they enter an

antebellum mansion.ccxiii Though the father tells his son “[o]ld stories of courage and

justice”ccxiv about the South, he neglects to teach him about the unjust subjugation of non-

Whites. History is sanitized, stripped of its racial crimes. All issues of race seem to be

safely in the past, seared away by the fires of the indeterminate catastrophe.

Race is not the only concept denied by neoliberalism that The Road’s unnamed

disaster seems to obliterate. McCarthy presents a world where society and an ethics of

social responsibility have been similarly erased.ccxv Nation-states have collapsed,ccxvi and

survivors roam the streets and cities in small, pseudo-tribal groups, shunning the prospect

of large-scale organization. This state of affairs seems to confirm Margaret Thatcher’s

maxim that “[t]here is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and

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there are families.”ccxvii Avoiding the company of other humans, who are apt to be thieves,

murderers or cannibals,ccxviii the father and son rely upon their “cunning and guts” to

survive in the harsh wasteland: making their own food, gathering their own supplies, and

even treating their own wounds.ccxix The pair appear to live in a privatized manner,

without care or consideration for others. Their sparse, monotonous dialogue emphasizes

their isolation and self-sufficiency. Private residences and structures are the only shelters

and safe havens in this cold world—the protagonists never find sanctuary in public

spaces or government buildings. The fantasy world of The Road thus seems to confirm

Bauman’s lamentation that “[i]n contemporary dreams the image of ‘progress’ seems to

have moved from the discourse of shared improvement to that of individual survival.”ccxx

I contend that, despite superficially justifying neoliberal declarations of the end of

race, society and social ethics, The Road actually illustrates the re-emergence of each of

these concepts in an “underground” form. Though race and racism are never referred to

explicitly, they manifest in the man’s views of his fellow survivors. The man, having

observed the collapse of (White) American society, regards the future with trepidation:

“The world [was] soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins… carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”ccxxi

By referring to the denizens of the inner cities to as “blackened looters,” the man invokes

the racist image of the criminal black man. By assuming them to be cannibalistic savages,

he alludes to colonial stereotypes of the natives of Africa and the Americas, while

referring only to their supposed character. In the antebellum manor I mentioned, though

he does not overtly reflect upon slavery, McCarthy depicts people imprisoned as chattel:

“Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to

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hide...On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them

blackened and burnt.”ccxxii Even though these inmates cry for help and the son implores

his father to assist them, the man flees. Set in his ways, he is unwilling to liberate those

pressed into bondage and incapable of showing compassion towards “blackened” others.

When the protagonists encounter a man struck by lightning on the road, “as burntlooking

as the country,”ccxxiii the father once again insists that they press on, overruling his son’s

pleas to offer support. Slavery is mentioned one other time in the novel, when the

protagonists observe a gang of neo-feudal warlords parading down the road with “wagons

drawn by slaves in harness.”ccxxiv This scene depicts a new iteration of slavery in the

(post) American South, which, though it does not mention the racial identity of slaves or

slavers, cannot help but invoke the historical enslavement of African blacks.

Just as race is not actually absent from The Road, it is not accurate to say that

society and ethics have vanished from its world. In spite of their apparent independence

and lack of concern for others, the father and son in The Road are neither wholly self-

sufficient nor self-absorbed. For sustenance, they depend on canned foods stockpiled by

citizens long dead. To eat, they must rely on the charity of others who give without

condition or payment. If the pair were truly monadic, they would perish. They have no

choice but to regard private homes as public spaces, which can be entered with impunity,

and to consider the food and resources within as public goods.ccxxv Once inside, they often

depend upon the judgment of others who came before. Upon finding unopened jars of

tomatoes, the father opts to let them be, as “[s]omeone before had not trusted them and in

the end neither did he.”ccxxvi The protagonists actually show a great deal of concern for

others they encounter on the road, acting hospitably to those who pose no threat. When

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they come across an old man, at the son’s insistence, they share a meal with him.ccxxvii

After eating and talking, the old man leaves without giving thanks or displaying

gratitude. Phillip Snyder suggests that the “pure kind of ethical empathy” in this scene

“reflects the Derridian notion that real hospitality exists without acknowledgment and

without reciprocation; it exists as a gift, beyond anyone’s ability to articulate it.”ccxxviii The

clipped, repetitive dialogue in this scene does not merely indicate the characters’ isolation

and self-sufficiency, as I suggested earlier, it highlights the inexpressibility of a social

bond, which can form in spite of the apparent end of communality and ethical

responsibility. The protagonists view ethics as what keeps them human, as what sets them

apart from the roadagents: “We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?” the son asks his

father. “No. Of course not,” he replies. “Because we’re the good guys.”ccxxix Although it

may take a cataclysmic event, The Road is able to bring to the surface feelings of public

solidarity and ethical hospitality, which are unacknowledged by the neoliberal social

order.

There is undeniable tension between the father’s disposition towards “blackened”

others and the son’s intuitive ethical hospitality. The boy does not blindly accept all of

the attitudes of his father, whose “stories are suspect,”ccxxx holding him to account for his

numerous ethical lapses and refusals to help the enslaved. This tension is resolved in the

final pages of the book when, after the father is dead, the son trusts in a stranger with

“long and matted,”ccxxxi (dreadlocked) hair. While race remains coded in this scene, the

boy rejects his father’s racial suspicion of people encountered upon the road. At the end,

openness triumphs over fear, love and community overcome hostility and separation.

From a certain perspective, race, society, and ethics have indeed seemed to vanish

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from the United States—particularly when compared to the Knoxville, Tennessee of

McCarthy’s youth. Slavery and Jim Crow laws have long been abolished, overt legal

enshrinements of racial discrimination are prohibited, and individual persons of colour

are able to rise socially and politically. When people can live almost their entire lives in

solitude, never encountering their neighbours, connected to the outside world only

through electronic signals, it can certainly seem like society no longer exists, as though

an ethics of hospitality is a historical anachronism. This of course does not mean that

these concepts are no longer present, just that they are no longer recognizable as they

once were. The Road’s portrayal of race, society and ethics in the face of their dismissal

by neoliberalism exposes the willful blindness of contemporary ideology, while gesturing

towards a future of racial and social justice. By recognizing latent potential for a

reconfiguration of race, society and ethics, The Road opens the door to a revitalized

politics, which can go beyond neoliberalism’s reduction of citizens to free-floating,

raceless individuals, unassociated with community and uninterested in social justice.

Conclusion—The Politics of Post-Apocalypticism

Although The Road creates space for envisioning a world in which a new

humanism, re-imbued with emancipatory potential and faith in human improvability, and

a new politics, capable of serving the public good, strengthening social bonds, and

economizing violence, can blossom, it falls well short of realizing this dream. The extent

and effectiveness of the novel’s critique of post-humanist skepticism and neoliberalism is

limited by its own post-apocalyptic setting—a mythical, indeterminate location, safely

removed from anything resembling day-to-day reality, which allows McCarthy to avoid

directly confronting the socio-politico struggles of twenty-first-century North America.

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Political issues that affect contemporary life—including unemployment, distribution of

wealth, poverty, economic management, environmental policies etc.—simply have no

bearing on the world of The Road. It is an environment in which all standards of

valuation, all points of reference disappear. Should we therefore dismiss The Road as a

retreat from the problems of the present, a withdrawal into the isolationist fantasy of a

depoliticized doomsday? Or, more sinisterly, as a conservative apology for the demise of

humanism and the injustices of neoliberalism, which defers cultural and political renewal

indefinitely to the future in order to derail attempts to effect change in the present?

I suggest that The Road is neither an apolitical fantasy, nor a conservative

exoneration of neoliberal politics and ethics, but rather an incomplete critique of post-

humanist skepticism and neoliberalism. As I mention in endnotes 35 and 101, its flaw is

that it postpones action to the future, implying that future generations must bear ultimate

responsibility for devising solutions to current problems. We can see this postponement

in the way that the man, unable to extricate himself from the standards of the past, looks

around and sees nothing but the horrific remains of civilization, regarding the present as a

hopeless situation and the future as a monstrous eventuality, ccxxxii while the son,

“strangely untroubled”ccxxxiii by signs of decay, beholds in the post-apocalyptic wasteland

a new world. The father’s inability to recognize any signs of goodness in the present, his

tendency to tell “[o]ld stories of courage and justice”ccxxxiv rather than to create new tales

appropriate for the new world, and his unfailing cynicism towards all people the pair

encounter on the road, suggest that the world of the present is doomed. There is no way

for adults alive today to change their ways, come to grips with current iterations of

change and conflict, and improve things themselves. Only children, who see the world

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with fresh eyes and can find hope where we cannot help but see despair, have a chance to

make things better.

The novel’s inability to candidly engage with the problems of the present is

symptomatic of the time in which it was written: it is the apocalyptic nightmare of a

society, which, confronted with increasingly indisputable evidence of forthcoming social,

cultural and political change, has proven utterly incapable of openly acknowledging the

very challenges it faces.ccxxxv While we must recognize the limitations of McCarthy’s

critique, we should recognize what it does accomplish: namely, the problematization of

post-apocalypticism, which, as I have already discussed, underwrites neoliberal discourse

(“There Is No Alternative”) and dismissals of humanism (“Man did not survive God”).

McCarthy’s illustration of the recurrence of humanism, progress, race, society,

and ethics in the wake of their apparent terminations exposes an erroneous assumption of

post-apocalyptic theory: the belief that certain concepts, including apocalypse itself, both

can and have come to a remainderless conclusion. Post-apocalypticism, as Jameson says

of postmodernism, “looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale

instant after which it is no longer the same; for the ‘When-it-all-changed.’”ccxxxvi To

declare that something has come to a definitive conclusion is to assert that a major

transformation —a final, “apocalyptic” change—has occurred, which is so great as to

prevent possibility any future reversal or modification.ccxxxvii Post-apocalypticism is thus

predicated upon the violent, normative presumption that certain states of being are not

subject to difference, that diversity and deferral are ultimately subsumed by a

unchallengeable sameness. As there is no politics without difference and change, and no

ethics without otherness, this presumption has grave repercussions. By projecting into the

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future a never-ending recurrence of the same, post-apocalypticism’s revelation is the

impossibility of revelation, its politics the end of politics, its ethics the end of ethics, its

apocalypse the end of apocalypse. To destabilize this theory, as McCarthy’s novel does,

is thus of great critical significance. As I have attempted to show throughout this paper,

The Road illustrates that the very act of identifying an “end” is difficult. What appears to

be a sign of termination and decline from one perspective, seems to be the beginning of a

novel re-iteration from another. Despite the father’s nihilistic expectations of ruin, ccxxxviii

the novel rejects the finality implied by post-apocalyptic discourse by demonstrating the

inevitable deferral of resolution, dissolution, and termination. Although The Road’s

deferral of political action to the future speaks to a timid (if not regressive) refusal to take

responsibility today for the world of tomorrow, its deferral of apocalyptic resolution

fulfills a precondition for any consideration of ethico-political responsibility.

By challenging the possibility of total closure and disclosure, upon which post-

apocalyptic discourses like neoliberalismccxxxix depend, The Road lays the groundwork for

a more thorough critique, which can specifically examine and combat the manifestation

of post-apocalyptic thought in the present. It forces us to reconsider the legitimacy of

doctrines like postmodernism and neoliberalism, which declare an end to revelation and

inquiry.ccxl It proves that no doctrine or hegemony is immutable, that all things are subject

to alteration and critique, and thus clears the ground for a progressive reading of

apocalypse. As Derrida reminds us, “Nothing is less conservative than the apocalyptic

genre…By its very tone, the mixing of voices, genres, and codes, apocalyptic discourse

can also, in dislocating destinations, dismantle the dominant contract or

concordat.”ccxliAlthough we cannot classify The Road as a hopeful work, it does attempt

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to come to terms with inevitability of cultural, political and economic transformation,

without resorting to despair, paralysis or nihilism. It therefore evinces what we might call

a hope for hope, a desire for that which may never be fully realized. When we gaze at a

world that is certain to change—and indeed, there is no world other—this may be the

only hope we can have.

Notes

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i Cormac McCarthy, The Road, (New York: Vintage International, 2006), 3.ii Comparing McCarthy’s descriptions of The Road’s setting to real-world geographical sites, Wesley G. Morgan suggests that the father and son’s journey takes place in the southeastern United States, from McCarthy’s hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee to the coast of South Carolina. Whether Morgan’s analysis is correct or not, the post-apocalyptic setting of the novel complicates any attempt to definitively situate the plot within space or time. All landmarks and referential terms that we are accustomed to using in order to establish positions cease to have meaning in this world. As the father tells his son, they are located in “[w]hat used to be called the states.” McCarthy, 36iii Chris Walsh, “The Post-Southern Sense of Place in The Road,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 6 (Autumn 2008), 48.iv See Chris Walsh, “The Post-Southern Sense of Place in The Road,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 6 (Autumn 2008)v Linda Woodson, “Mapping The Road in Post-Postmodernism,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 6 (Autumn 2008), 88.vi Greenwood, 25.vii Randall S. Wilhelm, “Golden chalice, good to house a god: Still Life in The Road,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 6 (Autumn 2008), 129.viii Jacques Derrida reminds us that, in a way, all texts: “as soon as one no longer knows who speaks or who writes, the text becomes apocalyptic.” Jacques Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” Raising the Tone of Philosophy, Ed. Peter Fenves, Trans. John Levey Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 118.ix Jacques Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” Raising the Tone of Philosophy, Ed. Peter Fenves, Trans. John Levey Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 118.x Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996), 1.xiJacques Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” Raising the Tone of Philosophy, Ed. Peter Fenves, Trans. John Levey Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 118.xii James Berger, After the End, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1999), 9.xiii Joseph Dewey, In a Dark Time, (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue Research Foundation, 1990), 10.xiv Perhaps it is because of apocalypse’s promised dissolution of difference that the trope has held such appeal throughout history. The event of apocalypse would, of course, precipitate what is the greatest difference imaginable, i.e. a transition from ordinary time to apocalyptic time. Yet this transformation is able to be interpreted as a reversion to the natural state of sameness. This normative state is inherently anti-political and anti-ethical, as both politics and ethics are predicated upon encounters with otherness. Sacrifice, concession, and compromise are no longer necessary, a single order rules over all. An interesting future project would be to examine the relationship between apocalypse and American exceptionalism.xv As Derrida reminds us, “A work takes place just once, and far from going against history, this uniqueness of the institution, which is in no way natural and will never be replaced, seems to me historical through and through… Attention to history, context, and genre is necessitated, and not contradicted, by this singularity, by the date and the signature of the work: not the date and signature which might be inscribed on the external border of the work or around it, but the ones which constitute or institute the very body of the work, on the edge between the “inside” and the “outside.” Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” Acts of Literature, Ed. Derek Attridge, Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 67.xvi A few important work of apocalyptic fiction from the British tradition, which are, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this project to address, include Mary Shelley’s 1826 The Last Man, Richard Jeffries’ 1885 After London, and H.G Wells’ The War of the Worlds A few examples of “apocalyptic”

myths that do not derive from the Judeo-Christian tradition: The Aztec Legend of Five Suns, the Ancient Egyptian Myth of Hathor, the Norse Myth of Ragnarok etc.xvii Dewey, 18.xviii Dewey, 23.xix Qtd. in Ernest Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1968), 119.xx Herman Melville, White Jacket, Chapter 36, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10712/10712-h/10712-h.htm#chap36.xxi Zbigniew Lewicki, The Band and the Whimper: Apocalypse and Entropy in American Literature, (Westport Connecticut: Greenwoood Press, 1984), xiv. xxii Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” The Norton Anthology of American Literature Shorter Sixth Edition, Ed. Nina Baym, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 714.xxiii Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007), 41.xxiv Crane, 233.xxv Admittedly, Eliot is a difficult case, who, insofar as he spent much of his life in England and became a naturalized citizen of the United Kingdom, cannot be unproblematically cited as an American poet. I nevertheless opt to discuss his work in my paper, as the influence of “The Wasteland” and “The Hollow Men” on literature and popular culture in both Britain and the United States cannot be understated.xxvi T.S Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” The Norton Anthology of American Literature Shorter Sixth Edition, Ed. Nina Baym, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 1997.xxvii Jack Kerouac, On the Road, (London: Penguin, 1996), 241.xxviii Scott Sanders, “Pynchon’s Paranoid History,” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 21, No. 2, May, 1975, 184-5.xxix Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1995), 209xxx McCarthy 28.xxxi As McCarthy’s narrator remarks: “Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went tumbling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.” McCarthy, 181.xxxii Vereen Bell, “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy,” The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 15 No. 2 Spring 1983, 31.xxxiii Greenwood, 24.xxxiv Jacques Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” 167.xxxv Though I argue that The Road replicates late-capitalist, neoliberal society’s deleterious views of humanism, progress, ethics and society in order to repudiate them, I do not want to overstate the work’s radicality. By couching a critique of post-humanist skepticism and neoliberalism within a narrative about life after doomsday—and thereby projecting engagement with the conflicts and injustices engendered by these contemporary ideologies into a hypothetical, essentially different future—McCarthy avoids the difficult task of confronting these issues within their current context, preferring the “safe,” de-politicized space of the parousia to the polarized climate of the world today. The Road defers judgment and action to the world of tomorrow, compelling its children to decide whether our age should be memorialized as an era of heroism or infamy.xxxvi See, for example, Franny Armstrong’s 2009 film The Age of Stupid.xxxvii See, for example, Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near. (London: Viking Penguin, 2005).xxxviii Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism (Chicago: Bookmarks Publications, 2009), 1.xxxix Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1.xl Teresa Heffernan, Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 7.xli Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, (New York: MacMillan 1992), 46.

xlii McCarthy, 3xliii The father recollects the last time he saw avian life: “Once in those early years he’d awakened in a barren wood and lay listening to flocks of migratory birds overhead in that bitter dark…He wished them godspeed till they were gone. He never heard them again.” McCarthy, 53.xliv The father looks for fish throughout the novel. Every dead pond reminds him of what used to be: “He stood on the stone bridge where the waters slurried into a pool and turned slowly in a gray foam. Where once he’d watched trout swaying in the current, tracking their perfect shadows on the stones beneath.” McCarthy, 30.xlv “A rich southern wood that once held mayapple and pipsissewa. Ginseng.” McCarthy, 40.xlvi McCarthy, 222.xlvii McCarthy, 18.xlviii McCarthy, 162.xlix McCarthy, 168.l The father in McCarthy’s novel seems to uphold this belief in the almighty destructive/redemptive power of “Tomorrow.” Negatively assessing the worth of books in a world without a future, the man suggests that “the value of the smallest thing [is] predicated on a world to come…the space [in] which…things occupied was itself an expectation.” McCarthy, 187.li Greenwood, 24-5.lii Linda Woodson, “Mapping The Road in Post-Postmodernism,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 6 (Autumn 2008), 92.liii McCarthy, 88.liv The ambiguity of the narrator’s perspective raises the question: Is this novel’s narration addressed by a detached, omniscient third-party or does it emanate from the father’s own imagination? The final pages of the text, after the man’s death, in which the narrator switches perspective and focuses upon the boy, suggest that the latter may be the case. The happy resolution to the text, which details the adoption of the boy by strangers and the reconstruction of a lost nuclear family, is so incongruous with previous events—including descriptions of families eating their own children—that it may be the wishful fantasy of a dead man, a realization of his desire for a better future for his child.lv Frank Kermode, Sense of An Ending, (New York: Oxford UP, 2000), 7.lvi Frank Kermode, Sense of An Ending, (New York: Oxford UP, 2000), 7.lvii Kermode, 160.lviii Jacques Derrida, “Uninterrupted Dialogue: Between Two Infinities, the Poem,” Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 34, No.1, 3.lix Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” Diacritics, Vol.14, No.2, 28.lx Frank Kermode, “Waiting for the end,” Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 250.lxi Kermode, Sense of An Ending, 93-94.lxii Kermode, Sense of An Ending,116.lxiii Berger, 13.lxiv Kermode, Sense of An Ending, 29.lxv Kermode, Sense of An Ending, 4.lxvi Jay Ellis, “Another Sense of Ending: The Keynote Address to the Knoxville Conference,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 6 Autumn 2008, 23. lxvii Dewey, 16.lxviii McCarthy, 32.lxix McCarthy, 4.lxx McCarthy, 154.lxxi McCarthy, 172.

lxxii Dewey, 16.lxxiii Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, Ed. Bernard Williams, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 119-120.lxxiv Frank Newport “More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God,” Gallup, June 3, 2011. http://www.gallup.com/poll/147887/americans-continue-believe-god.aspxlxxv “America By The Numbers: What We Believe,” Time, October 22, 2006. http://www.time.com/time/covers/20061030/what_we_believe/lxxvi Dewey, 16.lxxvii For example, when reminiscing about his dead wife, the man cries unto himself “Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.” McCarthy, 12.lxxviii For example, when watching the boy carry wood and stoke a fire, the man calls him “God’s own firedrake.” McCarthy, 31.lxxix For example, upon finding the bomb shelter filled with food and supplies, the pair perform a prayer of thanksgiving: “The boy sat staring at his plate. He seemed lost. The man was about to speak when he said: Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldn’t eat it no matter how hungry we were and we’re sorry that you didn’t get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God.” McCarthy, 146.lxxx Robert Coles, “The Stranger,” New Yorker 50 (26 Aug. 1974), 90.lxxxi Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass, (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 24.lxxxii Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide To European Literature 1890-1930, (New York: Penguin 1991),27lxxxiii Bradbury and McFarlane, 275.lxxxiv Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (New York: Penguin, 1988), 18.lxxxv Frances Cary, The Apocalypse and The Shape of Things to Come, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 270.lxxxvi Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, Trans. David Willis, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 36.lxxxvii I suggest that T.S Eliot’s poems similarly express these attitudes. In “The Wasteland,” Eliot articulates the turmoil of modernity and the collapse of old forms through a cacophony of voices, which speak in different languages and cite texts as varied as the Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Hindu Upanishads and Chapman’s Birds of Eastern North America. This poem should not be read as an exasperated concession to chaos in the face of diversity and change, but rather as an attempt to fuse variegated traditions into one Babelian, multilingual work. It does not surrender itself to absurdity, it endeavors to reconcile the new with the old, reclaim a dignity for the modern subject, and bring all of the rapid, random transformations of industrial and cultural development to some coherent conclusion. Eliot gazes upon the “unreal cities” of his time, and dreams of “set[ting] [his] lands in order.” The final lines of the poem, the Hindu mantra “Shantih Shantih Shantih,” which means “peace, peace, peace,” are the traditional ending to an Upanishad. This conclusion indicates that peace and closure are attainable, even if we may have to reach beyond our present means, perhaps even outside of the “Western” canon, to achieve them. In “The Hollow Men,” Eliot similarly envisions closure in spite of chaos. Although the end comes with “a whimper,” it still arrives. Though the modern world is pathetic and unmanly compared to the retrospectively illustrious past, it still has a telos. It is still perfectible. Though modern men are mere effigies, they possess a noble form. Their hollowness may yet be filled. lxxxviii Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 28.lxxxix Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 35.xc Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 35.xci Berger, 7.

xcii Berger, 34.xciii Berger, 7.xciv Berger, xiii.xcv Jean Baudrillard, “The Anorexic Ruins,” Looking Back on the End of the World. Trans. David Antal. Ed. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, (New York: Foreign Agent Series. Semiotext(e), 1989), 34.xcvi Heffernan, 6.xcvii Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 53.xcviii Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings, Trans. R.W Postgate, (Mineola New York: Dover Publications, 2003), 128.xcix Heffernan, 11.c Unfortunately, due to the scope of this project, I am forced to limit my discussion of the latter two terms. My analysis of the relationship between postmodernism, post-apocalypticism and The Road will emerge in a future project.ci Although I argue that The Road’s repudiation of post-apocalyptic presumptions of closure and problematization of the tenets of neoliberalism has potentially progressive implications, I acknowledge that there are unsettling absences in the text, which permit it to be read as an apology for political inaction and dogmatism. By setting the narrative in a wasted fantasy world that is, on a cosmetic level at least, completely unlike the society we see around us, McCarthy is able to avoid directly naming the anti-humanistic, anti-progressive, neoliberal forces that imbue North American politics and culture with a sense of inevitability and paralysis. Preferring to remain in the realm of the abstract and allegorical, McCarthy refers to contemporary concerns only in an oblique manner. Although John Vidal calls McCarthy “one of 50 people that can save the world,” (See Footnote 157) The Road is hardly a call to arms or activist manifesto. It does not indicate whether there was any way to prevent the unnamed disaster from occurring, nor does it suggest any ways of mitigating the consequences of catastrophe, save for individual ingenuity and industry. The dream-world of The Road, which represents perhaps “the worst” situation imaginable, not only demeans the hardships faced by people in the world today (after all, things could be so much worse), it potentially hamstrings efforts to improve conditions in the present, insofar as it implies that things will have to get a whole lot worse (i.e. the whole world must pass away) before they can get better.cii One could read my genealogy of American apocalypse as a history of interpretations of the worth of human existence. ciii Heffernan, 152.civ Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges In French Thought, (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010), 1-2.cv Theorists like Donna Harraway suggest that not only we not fully human, we are not even fully organic. In the late-twentieth century, “humans” are complex blends of biology and technology, chimeric mixtures of machine and matter—in other words, cyborgs. Any ontological investigation should proceed from this recognition, and not attemp to determine some quixotic, pure “essence” of humanity. See Donna Harraway A Cyborg Manifesto. cvi Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 387.cvii Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1.cviii Foucault, 44.cix Pynchon eloquently explores the discomforting, non-disclosive nature of physical forces in Gravity’s Rainbow and “Entropy.”cx McCarthy, 4.cxi R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan, “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions” Science 23 December 1983: 222 (4630), 1283-1292.

cxii McCarthy, 14.cxiii McCarthy, 3.cxiv McCarthy, 8.cxv Ibid.cxvi McCarthy, 14.cxvii McCarthy, 215.cxviii McCarthy, 52.cxix The only thing that prevents us from definitively concluding that the unknown catastrophe in The Road is a thermonuclear conflict is the fact that there is no mention of radiation poisoning and no appearance of clouds of radioactive gas. We cannot rule out the possibility that it was the eruption of a supervolcano or the impact of a large asteroid, meteor or comet on the earth’s surface, all of which would produce similar conditions. That the mother uses an obsidian (volcanic glass) knife to slit her wrists and commit suicide suggests that the disaster could very well be a volcanic eruption. McCarthy, 58.cxx McCarthy’s conspicuous refusal to disclose the nature of the catastrophe, in spite of providing numerous clues that suggest it was the onset of nuclear war or massive volcanic eruption, warrants significant analysis. My own inclination is to read the ambiguity of the event as an attempt to imbue the disaster with a sense of timelessness, enabling readers to interpret it in whatever manner seems most appropriate for their particular context. While this ambiguity and timelessness permits the disaster to be a generic representative of all threats to humanity (or at least to the contemporary, consumerist, American way of life), both human-made and “natural,” it also dehistoricizes and depoliticizes it, allowing The Road to carefully side-step engagement with the very real dangers—climate change, overconsumption of resources, overpopulation, famine, rampant deforestation, thermonuclear warfare, global pandemics, etc.—that scientists and activists warn could have (and, in the case of climate-change and famine, are currently having) cataclysmic affects on the human world over the next century. By keeping the disaster abstract, present only as a vague terror that cannot be confronted directly, McCarthy (perhaps unintentionally) follows the template of the former Bush Administration’s global fear campaign, commonly referred to as the “War on Terror,” which substitutes phantasms for tangible concerns, and emotional responses to personal experiences of trauma for rational analysis of broad socio-political issues. Many reviewers have referred to The Road as a fable, a classification which perhaps accounts for or excuses (to a point) McCarthy’s insistent refusal to situate the plot within a definable place and time, and his purposeful obfuscation of the nature of the disaster.cxxi McCarthy, 16.cxxii McCarthy, 102.cxxiii McCarthy, 117.cxxiv McCarthy, 24.cxxv McCarthy, 107.cxxvi Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited, (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 10.cxxvii McCarthy, 24.cxxviii McCarthy, 11.cxxix McCarthy, 171.cxxx McCarthy, 143.cxxxi McCarthy, 9.cxxxii McCarthy, 9.cxxxiii McCarthy, 213.cxxxiv McCarthy, 3.cxxxv McCarthy, 5.cxxxvi McCarthy, 3.

cxxxvii McCarthy, 213.cxxxviii McCarthy, 18.cxxxix McCarthy, 21.cxl McCarthy, 14.cxli Arthur Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust, (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1993), 1.cxlii McCarthy, 116.cxliii McCarthy, 88-9.cxliv McCarthy, 88-9.cxlv McCarthy, 54.cxlvi “Finally he put it out of his mind. The notion that there could be anything to correct for.” McCarthy, 116.cxlvii McCarthy, 184.cxlviii McCarthy, 199.cxlix This is no longer the case, as modern zoological research has irrefutably demonstrated that many animals are also tool-users, including apes, elephants, birds, otters and octopuses. Nevertheless, the complexity and ubiquity of human tools is still unique to our species, such that the oldest species officially considered “human” is Homo habilis—“handy man”—so called for its proficiency with tools.cl McCarthy, 20.cli McCarthy, 273.clii McCarthy, 130.cliii McCarthy, 63.cliv Robert Brinkmeyer, Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West, (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 39.clv McCarthy, 75.clvi McCarthy, 148.clvii McCarthy, 139.clviii McCarthy, 151.clix McCarthy, 139.clx It is worth pointing out that the bomb shelter in which the protagonists take refuge was privately installed. The relic of an ultra-individualist, libertarian, frontier mentality that is becoming increasingly prevalent in the United States today, this is not a communal bunker, but a personal one. Though the father insists that the original owners would not mind if others make use of the shelter in a time of need, this point is certainly debatable. clxi A 2008 article in The Guardian names Cormac McCarthy as one of “50 people who could save the planet,” describing The Road as a “parable” capable of illustrating the horrific consequences of the destruction of the earth’s biosphere. “[McCarthy’s] predictions may be scientifically fanciful, but the book, [The Road] published last year, may have far more influence in the next 30 years than any number of statistics and front line reports.” See John Vidal, “50 people who could save the planet,” The Guardian, 5 January,2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jan/05/activists.ethicallivingclxii This is not to say that the peril of mutually assured destruction is a necessary condition for long-term forethought, nor to provide an apology for nuclear paranoia and survivalism, but rather to appreciate that the only way to persist in the nuclear age is to maintain belief in the absolute value of survival, what Derrida calls “survivance.” Derrida, “Not Apocalypse, Not Now,” 28clxiii McCarthy, 168.clxiv At the same time, it must be acknowledged that anticipations of catastrophe can very easily become self-fulfilling prophecies. To be utterly certain of the unavoidability of disaster is to dismiss the value of action in the present. It is to forsake the world of today for a fantasy world of tomorrow. I do not

believe that McCarthy’s exhortation of preparation and forethought in The Road prescribes such a withdrawal from the present. After all, the man is anxious to leave the apparent safety of the bunker, refusing to dwell within its simulated security. One may enjoy temporary respite in fantasies of self-sufficiency, preparedness, and isolation, but one must inevitably return to reality and continue the hard journey upon the road.clxv Palm Sunday is the celebration of Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem upon a donkey. clxvi Ash Wednesday is a day when parishioners are traditionally expected and encouraged to partake in the sacrament of confession. The association of ash with penitence can be traced back to the biblical books of Job and Maccabees, wherein individuals express regret for their transgressions by marking their bodies with ash and tearing their clothes.clxvii McCarthy, 16.clxviii McCarthy, 19.clxix McCarthy, 278.clxx McCarthy, 211.clxxi McCarthy, 40.clxxii David F. Greene, Michael Hesketh, and Edith Pounden (2010). "Emergence of morel (Morchella) and pixie cup (Geopyxis carbonaria) ascocarps in response to the intensity of forest floor combustion during a wildfire". Mycologia 102 (4): 766–773.clxxiii One example of this occurs after the man kills the roadagent who threatened his son with a knife: “He sat in the sand and inventoried the contents of the knapsack. The binoculars. A half pint bottle of gasoline almost full. The bottle of water. A pair of pliers. Two spoons. He set everything in a row.” McCarthy, 73.clxxiv McCarthy, 64.clxxv McCarthy, 16-7.clxxvi McCarthy, 17.clxxvii McCarthy, 274.clxxviii McCarthy, 20.clxxix Robert Brinkmeyer, 39.clxxx McCarthy, 98.clxxxi McCarthy, 118.clxxxii McCarthy, 122.clxxxiii McCarthy, 214.clxxxiv McCarthy, 14.clxxxv The father recognizes that his son is from a different world than himself, born with entirely different sensations and expectations. The man first comes to this realization when sleeping in the bomb shelter: “He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed.” McCarthy, 153.clxxxvi McCarthy, 192.clxxxvii By contrast, the father’s initial reaction to seeing his own image in a mirror is to reach for his gun: “They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It’s us, Papa, the boy whispered. It’s us.” McCarthy, 132. clxxxviii Georg Guillemin, “Introduction: The Prototypical Suttree,” Cormac McCarthy Ed. Harold Bloom 49.clxxxix McCarthy, 3.cxc McCarthy, 6.cxci McCarthy, 8.cxcii McCarthy uses a Bulmer typeface, designed by William Martin, first used for a 1792 Shakespeare Press edition of Shakespeare’s Folio.

cxciii McCarthy, 88.cxciv McCarthy, 74.cxcv See Umberto Eco, Apocalypse Postponed, Ed. Robert Lumley, (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994).cxcvi McCarthy, 278.cxcvii The father impresses on his son the importance of believing that there humans somewhere in the world, living together in peace. He tells him: “There are people. There are people and we’ll find them. Youl’ll see.” McCarthy, 244.cxcviii For a brief discussions of the complex relationship between McCarthy’s The Road and postmodernism, see Linda Woodson, “Mapping The Road in Post-Postmodernism,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 6 (Autumn 2008) and Ashley Kunsa, “Maps of the World in Its Becoming: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy's The Road”Journal of Modern Literature – Vol. 33,(Fall 2009).cxcix See Preface.cc Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, (Malden: Polity Press, 2006), 56.cci Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, (Malden: Polity Press, 2006)ccii David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, (New York: Oxford UP, 2005), 2.cciii Proponents and critics alike discuss neoliberalism in apocalyptic terms, regarding it either as the ultimate political model, in perfect conformity with human nature, to which, as the Thatcherite mantra goes, “There is no alternative”; or as a catastrophic policy, which is pushing human society towards a crisis of epic proportions.cciv Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, (New York: Verso 2009), 37.ccv Underwriting this position, Bauman argues, is the assumption that “whatever freedom was conceivable and likely to be achieved has already arrived; nothing more is left to be done than clean up the few remaining cluttered corners and fill the few blank spots—a job bound to be completed soon. Men and women are fully and truly free, and so the agenda of emancipation has been all but exhausted.” Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 22.ccvi Henry Giroux, Politics After Hope, (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2010), 25.ccvii Zygmunt Bauman, “To Hope is Human,” Tikkun 19, no. 6 (November-December 2004): 65.ccviii Henry Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism, (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), 106.ccix This is of particular concern because many apologists for neoliberal, free-market capitalism suggest that it is the most natural politico-economic model imaginable. See, for example, Mark Hunter “To Attack Capitalism is to Attack Human Nature,” Real Clear Markets, June 21, 2011. http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/06/21/to_attack_capitalism_is_to_attack_human_nature_99087.html. Hunter suggests neoliberal capitalism is “an organic economic system not created as much as evolving naturally as a consequence of free individuals interacting with other free individuals.”ccx Susan Giroux, Between Race and Reason, (Standford: Stanford UP, 2010), 4.ccxi David Theo Goldberg, Qtd. In Susan Giroux, Between Race and Reason, footnote 8ccxii It is because of this attitude that the disproportionate number of persons of colour who are unemployed or incarcerated is regarded in the media and in mainstream political debate not as a matter of race, but as a matter of character.ccxiii McCarthy, 107.ccxiv McCarthy, 41.ccxv “Ethical behavior is never easy to enact in McCarthy’s fictional worlds,” Phillip Snyder observes, “but here its possibility seems far, far beyond the pale.” Snyder, 70-1.ccxvi The father tells his son that they are in “[w]hat used to be called the states.” McCarthy, 36.ccxvii Women’s Own Magazine, October 31, 1987 http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htmccxviii “Well, I don’t think we’re likely to meet any good guys on the road,” the father tells his son.

McCarthy, 151.ccxix McCarthy, 266.ccxx Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times (London: Polity Press, 2006), 103.ccxxi McCarthy, 181.ccxxii McCarthy, 110.ccxxiii McCarthy, 49.ccxxiv McCarthy, 92.ccxxv This re-interpretation of private enclosures as public spaces manifests most strikingly when the protagonists enter the bomb shelter, a site designed to secure a personal sanctuary for a select few individuals while the rest of society meets their demise in the outside world. In The Road, it is people who evidently had no bunker for protection that are able to make use of the shelter, while those who installed the structure are presumed to have perished in the catastrophe. When the protagonists leave the shelter, they leave enough food and supplies within to help whomever may stumble upon the retreat afterward. Once the private sphere is breached, it thenceforth becomes public.ccxxvi McCarthy, 22.ccxxvii McCarthy, 163.ccxxviii Snyder, 81.ccxxix McCarthy, 128-9.ccxxx McCarthy, 153.ccxxxi McCarthy, 282.ccxxxii McCarthy, 181.ccxxxiii McCarty, 191.ccxxxiv McCarthy, 41.ccxxxv E.g. climate change, growing unemployment, peak oil, racial/gender income inequalities—all of which are, at present, conspicuously absent from mainstream political debate in North America.ccxxxvi Jameson, ix.ccxxxvii When confronting discourses that strongly proclaim “the end of this or that,”—in the case of post-apocalypticism, “the end of the end” itself—we should keep in mind Derrida’s advice in “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy”: i.e. to “intractably ask ourselves where they want to come to, and to what ends, those who declare the end of this or that…What effects do these noble, gentile prophets or eloquent visionaries want to produce? In view of what immediate or adjourned benefit? What do they do, what do we do in saying this? To seduce or subjugate whom, intimidate or make whom come?” Derrida “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” 148.ccxxxviii Having experienced the end of the world, witnessed civilization burn away before his eyes, and endured the deaths of almost everyone he ever cared about, the father purports understand the grim truth of reality: “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 of the interstate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe.”McCarthy, 130.ccxxxix Berger pejoratively refers to the American manifestation of neoliberal politics and economics as the “Reaganist Post-Apocalypse.” Berger, xvii.ccxl Searls-Giroux calls neoliberalism a “war on thought itself.” It is in part because of its post-apocalyptic nature that neoliberalism is so hostile to inquiry and critique. Searls-Giroux, 432.ccxli Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” 159-60.