The Double Death of Humanity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract

This article situates Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) within the tragic frame of post-apocalyptic narratives as they began to develop in the USA in response to the Bush administration’s messianic belief in 9/11 as a form of apocalyptic moment. Whereas the comic frame of the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic genres posits a catastrophe that could be prevented by human actions in the present, the tragic frame of the post-apocalyptic posits a situation in which the end of the world has provided no overarching meaning to human history. This leads to an intense focus on how individuals would survive, a minor eschatology that concentrates on the day-to-day struggle for life in a ruined world, in order to raise existentialist questions of why anyone would want to survive in a meaningless universe and what it means to be human when the civilization that structured our understanding of that term has passed away. However, the bleak pessimism of the narrative world and the disturbing suggestion that humanity has been wiped out not just as a species but as a moral quality is offset by McCarthy’s prose style, which encourages readers to reject nihilistic perspectives and accept the unlikely optimism that concludes the novel.