The Human, Nonhuman, Inhuman in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Abstract

Cormac McCarthy’s summoned gothic realm of terrorizing darkness and bestial hunger in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road (2006) is a spectacle defined by a sweeping sense of loss and a charred landscape. The interplay of the human, the nonhuman, and the inhuman molds the contours of the lived experience in this grey world of dwindling resources. Although this harrowing hell plays quite nicely into our fears of ecological apocalypse, manifesting our anxiety about our total dependency on the natural environment, The Road seems to be mainly preoccupied with the human, good and bad, taking the insolvent earth almost as a donnée. Ultimately, with almost no convincing sign of environmental rejuvenation, humanity’s sole saving grace seems to be the divinity within us; this manifests itself most clearly in the character of the boy, whose status as an archetypal savior figure in the story ties him very closely with the central issues of food and the subsequent moral choice.