Storytelling after the End: Plotting a Course through Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Abstract

abstract:This article discusses the importance of storytelling and plotting in Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). The novel follows a father and his son who, after a devastating global disaster, move through an ashen landscape in a desperate search for food, while attempting to evade roaming bands of cannibals. In this meaningless postcatastrophic world, the father insists on creating meaning for himself and his son as meaning has been created through millennia: by telling stories. The father tells his son stories of courage and justice and creates a coherent narrative universe around the opposition between cannibalistic "bad guys" and decent "good guys" who are "carrying the fire." The already vast reception of McCarthy's novel has discussed the father's storytelling extensively, but while critics have paid much attention to the moral and mythological dimensions of his stories, they have overlooked a crucial aspect of his narrative fabrications, namely his active construction of a linear, goal-oriented plot. Drawing on the theoretical work of Frank Kermode, Peter Brooks, and Hayden White, the article analyzes this neglected aspect of The Road and shows how the father's active plotting keeps both the story and the protagonists moving through the broken landscape.