Of Pandemics and Pilgrims: Reconciling Grief and Death in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Abstract

Of Pandemics and Pilgrims:Reconciling Grief and Death in Cormac McCarthy's The Road Shreya Rastogi (bio) and Srirupa Chatterjee (bio) Cormac McCarthy's The Road resonates with a world ravaged by an unprecedented pandemic in more ways than one. Published in a post 9/11 world and attesting to the zeitgeist of failed exceptionalism, McCarthy's novel with its hauntingly dry and desolate landscape characteristically draws our attention to post-apocalyptic times. The novel's setting, variously described as a "spectacle" of the "dying of life on the planet,"1 a "nuclear grey winter,"2 and "ecodystopic,"3 has become particularly and disturbingly relatable over the past year-and-a-half. Since in addition to the raging global pandemic, we have been witnessing visuals of incinerated sylvan terrains from California to the Amazon along with marooned centers of commerce, tourism, and conviviality under lockdowns, and above all the normalization of masks and bio-hazard suits which accompany panic to hoard and hustle commodities, The Road's apocalyptic theme for eerily mirroring ruin and extinction appears especially relevant now. Most of all, the constant spectre of death reiterated in the cadaver strewn landscape of the novel captures the embracive fear and grief of the pandemic. In revisiting the text now, we therefore not only experience solidarity with the plodding father-son duo, but also perceive respite in the novel's elevation of the victims and survivors to the status of 'pilgrims.' While re-reading The Road through the pandemic, we claim that grief and loss in McCarthy's text are cathartic and enable us to find similitude with the tenacious 'pilgrims' of the narrative. What humanity is currently experiencing cannot be reduced to one emotion. Grief of losing the loved, sustained uncertainty, fear, and helplessness have coalesced into an enduring melancholy which psychologists have termed 'pandemic grief.'4 Lockdown limitations and government deflation of the tragedy, however, have prevented most nations from public mourning or finding a sense of closure. In America such collective loss and grief was last experienced after the 9/11 attacks. Sadly, unlike the previous tragedy the nation this time is denied rituals of communal grieving. Few platforms that have articulated this overwhelming and unaddressed public grief include The New York Times which in spring last year resumed its 9/11 obituary column, "Portraits of Grief," under [End Page 126] the title "Those We've Lost" to mourn and commemorate the victims of COVID-19. Yet the swelling death tolls are only part of the current dystopia, and to the surviving, the protracted nature of the pandemic amidst social isolation and loneliness feels poignantly like the "onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world."5 In such a scenario, then, McCarthy's empathetic rendering of the text's deathscape "proffers an affirmation of the individual's ability to experience a transcendent, and perhaps ultimately redemptive, empathic connection with others."6 To highlight this 'affirmation,' we focus on the four occurrences of the mythic 'pilgrims' in The Road each of which, we argue, holds a redemptive message for the contemporary reader. We encounter the elusive 'pilgrim' on the very first page of the text. The man, we are told, wakes up from a dream in which "he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand […] [and] [l]ike pilgrims in a fable [they were] swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast."7 By explicitly conjuring the image of Jonah caged within the whale as punishment for his disobedience, this scene suggests the possibilities of redemption even within a post-apocalyptic world. Significantly, in the Old Testament parable Jonah is charged with announcing the impending apocalypse on the city of Nineveh, thereby giving the Ninevites a chance at redressal. In the New Testament, however, when the scribes of the Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign of their redemption, the savior rebukes: The evil and adventurous generation seeketh a sign, but there shall be no sign given to them, save the sign of the prophet Jonas. For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall...