Something to Be Done: The Road, Beckett, and American Autonomy

Abstract

Cormac McCarthy’s “use” of Beckett in The Road involves, at its most profound level, the symbolic deployment and roadside rejection of what his precursor’s work is assumed to convey. The novel would affirm, in its turn away from Beckett’s emphasis on the tortu(r)ous isolation of the self, the plausibility of radical personal autonomy, self-authorizing in its holy rituals, dynamic in translating its convictions into action, and capable of sustaining belief in divine and human love, even in the absence of a vital human community or natural environment. The Road proffers, at last, an archetypal narrative of rugged self-reliance in extremis.