Post Apocalyptic

-Collapse of societal structure as opposed to the end of the physical world.

Evidence of this in The Road:

Fall of Civilisation:

 Disgusting and disturbing scenes are commonplace throughout The Road and throughout McCarthy's fiction in general, this violence is a definitive sign of moral collapse and there is no societal structure in place to prevent this immoral actions taking place. McCarthy does more than just suggest that in this new dead world there is a lack of morals, by keeping relics from the old earth like the grocery cart and the can of coca cola McCarthy suggests that this evil was always intrinsic in humanity.

 The Road asks questions that McCarthy asked himself when raising his own son, in an interview McCarthy said that "he is so morally superior to me that I feel foolish correcting him about things" this character trait can also be found in the boy in The Road. The man has tried to distance himself from the boy but still the boy has what appears to be a fully developed moral conscience, despite being raised in a world where morality and ethics have lost meaning. This could be perceived to be a slightly more positive question from McCarthy about how inherent good or bad is in humans.

 The Road travels through a landscape utterly engulfed be decaying imagery; from the road melting to the buildings to actual corpses and food, the road can be described as a novel set in a rotting world. A key quote to summarise would be "cold and getting colder."If this decay is inherent in humanity then surely the fall of civilisation was always inevitable. 


Mythologising of the Past:

 McCarthy encapsulates the past like a myth through the use of elegiac language, throughout the novel certain sections are told with a sad but celebratory tone: the now presumed to be extinct brook trout are described with beauty "You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming." I partly wanted to include the whole quote due to the beauty of the language but also to highlight the amount of time McCarthy spends describing the extinct fish in comparison to the depth and length of dialogue in conversations between the man and the boy. The man specifically points out the dangers of dreaming of "siren worlds", "When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you." But the narration in the novel continues to paint a hazy, warm image of a beautiful past that may symbolise that the man has given up and now simply wants death's embrace.

  A key scene to understand McCarthy's mythological portrayal of the past is the section in which the man remembers his happiest childhood memory, a fishing trip with his uncle. The scene is certainly described warmly by McCarthy but like a myth the tale seems to have some purpose in the sense that it offers the man a warning. The description of "twisted stumps, grey and weathered" and "a dead perch lolling belly up in the clear water" are similar to the dead trees and dead life that the man is now surrounded by. McCarthy even ends this scene with "This the day to shape the days on." This is a myth recounted by the man that foreshadows how the rest of his life will be, it even predicts the man's relationship with his son, "neither of them said a word."

 Through the mythologising of the past McCarthy possibly brings a didactic sense to the text. The only things remaining in this dead world are functional buildings, anything remotely artful or soulful have long been left behind. This could reflect on capitalism's focus on efficiency and function and its effect on alienating workers. McCarthy is predicting what may happen if as a society we don't pay more attention to individual human needs, all characters met throughout the novel appear alienated, some even forging names (Ely) but most are nameless. McCarthy warns that if we continue in the same direction mankind will leave nothing in its wake.


Thoughts and Actions of Time Represented in our Imaginings of the end. (Post apocalyptic genre):

 The Road is part of a genre that uses modern day fears and creates an ending based on these fears. For example in the 50s and 60s the fear of invasion and a mindless enemy lead to films such as invasion of the body snatchers and dawn of the dead. The question is what modern day fear McCarthy is trying to display in The Road.

 One possible interpretation is that McCarthy wants us as a species to be more soulful, the relics of the previous world are all ones of consumerism and function but McCarthy wants us to "carry the fire" The boy having been raised in a world without purpose is determined to preserve human life and to seek some meaning of spirituality and meaning desp
ite the fact that he lives in a Godless world "there is no god and we are his prophets." McCarthy understands that sometimes in the modern world we experience paranoia and alienation, he suggests that we, despite how meaningful or meaningless our lives may be, should always seek to reach some sort of human level in our lives. He is scared that we may become the machines that we as a species work for. 

 References to nuclear war in The Road are inescapable, it also proves to be a recurring feature in McCarthy's other fiction. (The atomic bomb in The Crossing and possibly The Orchard Keeper and Cities of the Plain). These alongside the Man's survival instincts when pouring a bath etc do appear to point to the new world as a consequence of nuclear war, but the scale of destruction seems out of proportion for a nuclear winter. The destruction appears to be more of an allegorical sense, John Cant theorises that this "creates a wider metaphor for the condition of man in the realisation of his cosmic insignificance" this is signified in the details of the novel "the weeds they forded turned to dust about them."

 McCarthy's description of the scorched earth contains a link to The Great Gatsby. Both The Road and The Great Gatsby describe a "waste land" in Gatsby the valley of ashes in the road the earth itself. This waste land is a reference to the poet T.S Eliot whose defining work was called "the waste land" it too described waste desolation and futility.