Luminous Deceptions: Contingent Community and Aesthetic Form in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

Abstract

The final passage of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road describes a tranquil scene in which a school of trout seems to be in total communion with its environment. These pastoral qualities are out of place in dystopic context of novel, and as a result, passage has been focus of insightful about novel's ultimate meaning.1 The passage comes after father and son have journeyed through a dim and uncompromising landscape in hopes of finding warmth and shelter,2 and human life seems reduced to mere animalistic survival. At novel's end, father has died by side of road, boy has been found by another family who seem better fit to protect him (their gun has more bullets left), and boy has begun speaking to his dead father as a kind of commemoration of man's love and faith in boy's goodness. The final passage then seems to depart from grim setting, and a somewhat nostalgic but unaffected voice tells us of a world that has since disappeared:Once there were brook trout in streams in mountains. You see them in where white edges of their wimpled softly in flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which not be put back. Not be made right again. In deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.Characteristic of McCarthy's third person narrators, this voice does not indulge in what Vereen Bell calls reassuring thematic commentary (Bell 1). The scene is apart from world of novel, as indicated by vaguely past tense once and could see. Alongside these grammatical markers, novel presents a world covered in ash, in which there are likely no brook trout anywhere. Indeed, novel depicts a world shrinking down about a raw core of entities, which indicates that ash always floating in air will eventually be all that remains (83). Thus, we must ask where this narrative voice comes from, and what its apparent survival means about voice and storytelling as indicators of human existence. Because voice is a physical movement of air from mouth to ear, it is subject to this entropic process as well. Even in a metaphorical register, if there are no entities to parse because nothing is distinct from anything else, then a voice would have nothing to say even if it exist in a disembodied state. If the sacred idiom has indeed been shorn of its referent as father says at one point, then voice be coming from out of a void, perhaps akin to divine logos evoking world into being (83). However, link between language and materiality suggested by parsible forestalls this possibility.3Furthermore, objective distance achieved by voice in this passage does not make scene presented entirely alien to bleak world of novel, or to our own. If scene's pastoral qualities make it distinct from terrifying setting of father and son's journey, way in which they are evoked remind us of an elemental affinity between fish and ash they will become. The parallel comes partly from ambiguous location of scene; though a likely setting of novel suggests trout might be Appalachian, specificity of amber current and the white edges of their fins is in tension with subjunctive could see, mentioned above.4 That scene exists in past means that its presentation depends on speaker's perception filtered through memory. The scene itself calls this temporality to mind; though details that create it would be empirically verifiable were they frozen in time, fish are standing against a and eventually they will tire and have to turn into flow of water. As environment in which they live, flow of defines fish's lives; they cannot transcend it, just as speaker cannot transcend flow of time that defines human life. …