“We’ve Got to Move”: Mapping and Remapping the World in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cormac McCarthy’s The Road depicts the spatial dilemma in which a nameless father and son traverse a devastated post-apocalyptic world. Extensive studies have analyzed the roadmap and the doomsday landscape in critiquing the dissolution of meaning. However, scholars have neglected that the father and son’s narrative is a form of literary cartography, namely, an effort to alleviate spatial perplexity and construct meaning between humans and place through storytelling. This article hence posits that examining the pair’s mapping project carries significant implications in our understanding of the father’s torturous struggle with his sense of place, the pair’s mapping and remapping work to imbue the world with meaning, and their commitment to the embodied practice of mobility.