Embodied Reading and Narrative Empathy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road presents itself as a fascinating case study in aesthetic emotion. Recent work in cognitive-oriented narrative theory helps to illuminate the formal and stylistic features through which The Road elicits a powerfully immersive, empathic experience in its readers. McCarthy achieves this effect through careful modulations of narrative voice and point of view designed to stimulate the reader’s embodied identification with the novel’s central protagonist, though in a resolutely controlled manner—which in effect allows us to experience the extreme depravity, terror, and sadness of the storyworld without the whole thing becoming too unbearable. Read in this way, the novel becomes itself a powerful literary reflection on the nature of narrative empathy and aesthetic emotions.