Of Pandemics and Pilgrims: Reconciling Grief and Death in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Abstract

The novel's setting, variously described as a "spectacle" of the "dying of life on the planet,"1 a "nuclear grey winter,"2 and "ecodystopic,"3 has become particularly and disturbingly relatable over the past year-and-a-half. Since in addition to the raging global pandemic, we have been witnessing visuals of incinerated sylvan terrains from California to the Amazon along with marooned centers of commerce, tourism, and conviviality under lockdowns, and above all the normalization of masks and bio-hazard suits which accompany panic to hoard and hustle commodities, The Road's apocalyptic theme for eerily mirroring ruin and extinction appears especially relevant now. Yet the swelling death tolls are only part of the current dystopia, and to the surviving, the protracted nature of the pandemic amidst social isolation and loneliness feels poignantly like the "onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. [...]like contemporary post-apocalyptic narratives the emphasis here is switched "to the survivor rather than the savior and how […] faith and community can provide hope for possible futures. "13 Here the word 'discalced' along with the image of dried cadavers arguably evokes the Capuchin Crypt which houses the physical remains of deceased monks (a discalced order) arranged in artistic arches and patterns. Since the Capuchin friars tacitly resign to the constant presence of their dead brethren all around them, they arguably represent a reconciliation with their own mortality and necessitate the overcoming of grief.