Traces of Postmodern Vocabulary in The Road by Cormac McCarthy

AbstractThe Road, written by the American novelist Cormac McCarthy in 2006, offers a decentring representation of a ruined world in which a handful of people are alive. An alienated father with his lost-in-ambiguity son on the road to survival scours the ruins for food and water, for life and meaning, and for hope long faded in a world bereft of all meaning, civilisation, and humanity, and supplanted by haunting traumas, cannibalism, and death. The novel has been subject to numerous critical analyses among which the postmodern facet, albeit a wide window to see through, has received scant critical attention. In terms of periodization and thematic analysis, postmodernism is a late twentieth century movement, which is often deemed as the successor to modernism, what is after the contemporary, it is characterised by fragmentation in style, a general disbelief in social, political, and religious narratives, paranoia, uncertainty, and deconstruction. Thus, McCarthy depicts a paranoia-stricken world, fragmented in style and theme, beleaguered by scepticism and the depthless. However, as mentioned before, the many aspects of postmodernism discernable in the novel have escaped critics’ attention. Drawing on the extracted terms by Bennett and Royle, known as the “postmodern vocabulary”, seeking to present a synopsis of the terms, and see the present work of art through their lenses, the present article not only delineates the traces of postmodern vocabularies at work in the novel but also strives to explore both their possible cause of appearance in and the effect they have wrought on the post-apocalyptic ambience of the novel. It will be concluded that this novel houses almost all the aspects of postmodernism discussed by Bennett and Royle. Keywords: Cormac McCarthy, The Road, postmodernism, the postmodern, the postmodern vocabulary