Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Prof. Greg
14 Nov 2018
When we consider The Road as a horror story, we may find that the story is not simply
about the topic of survival. In The Road, the author Cormac McCarthy draws an abnormal world,
in which disasters frequently happen and the food cannot grow anymore. By using multiple
rhetorical devices, McCarthy portrays the abnormal world as the monster, which is impure. For
the abnormal environment, McCarthy uses the ghost as a metaphor to show that how the ghost of
environment haunts people and takes away people’s hope. McCarthy tries to appeal that people
should hold their faiths to deal with the uncertain world. In other words, people should keep
pursuing what they believe is good. However, there is also some complication about what the
goodness is in practice. For this point, by establishing the different characteristics of the man and
the boy, McCarthy explains that being purely good is not always practical because the world is
impure. Thus, in practice, people should behave pragmatically good. Finally, McCarthy conveys
the message that sometimes the results may contradict our faith, but it is still worthwhile to keep
the faith. In short, McCarthy utilizes the abnormal environment to reflect the contemporary
American society and to bring the metaphorical meanings of the story to audience.
illustrates that the world is impure and hence is the art-horror monster. In syntax, a basic
complete sentence should at least contain a subject, a predicate, and an object. However, when
McCarthy describes the settings, sometimes he leaves a subject as a single sentence, and
Ling 2
sometimes he only leaves an object. For example, when he describes the setting after the man
They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill
country. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the interstate high-way
below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and growing colder
(12).
tries to highlight the elements such as “raw hill country,” “aluminum houses,” “interstate high-
way,” and “secondgrowth timber”. There are no obvious logical relations between these
elements, which means the elements also make the sentences fragmented to some extent. As
American philosopher Noël Carroll points out in his article “The Nature of Horror,” the art-
horror monster is categorically contradictory or incomplete in some sense (55). Therefore, this is
significant in The Road because Cormac McCarthy also uses fragmented sentence to describe a
fragmented, categorically broken world. Therefore, the world, according to Carroll, is impure.
Impurity means categorically contradictory or complicated. Therefore, given that this is an art-
horror monster, then we can assert that this monster is a remnant of the world that lived before.
In other words, the road that the boy and the man are walking on is ghostly.
how the ghost of environment haunts people and takes people’s hope. According to the
description in The Road, we know that the woman loses the hope and thinks it is meaningless to
live in such a disgusting and horrible world. However, before she goes to die, she still tries to
persuade the man to die and regards nothingness about the man’s faith. She says:
A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost.
Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb
Ling 3
and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal
Literally, McCarthy uses the ghost as a metaphor for the boy. As the woman thinks, the man
urges her to give birth to the boy because he wants to make a hope to live, which is just like to
“cobble together some passable ghost” (59). The man takes care of the boy and protects the boy
from harm, which is just like to “breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love [and]
offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body” (59). From her perspective,
the man essentially is hopeless as well. Without the boy, the man is supposed to die as she does.
In fact, the woman’s thought is too pessimistic and skeptical. As professor D. Marcel DeCoste
writes in the article “A Thing That Even Death Cannot Undo,” the desolate world in which we
first meet our protagonists is a rebuke to any hope for the future, faith in the eternal with fellow
human beings (69). The woman rebukes the man’s hope for the future. She is exactly the ghost
who is infected by the ghost of environment. She is category contradicted. Although she is still
alive at that time, her heart has been dead. The woman’s ideology and behavior is actually a
consequence of the abnormal environment, which takes all of her hope and makes her also as a
ghost to haunt others. Thus, we can make an assertion that the environment is a ghost, which is
essentially dead but still haunting and infecting who habit it.
Under the ghost of environment, McCarthy shapes The Road as a story about keeping the
faith to face the uncertain future. In The Road, McCarthy creates an uncertain world. At the
beginning, McCarthy does not provide the cause of the post-apocalyptic world, providing a
reception of uncertainty. However, this is not the uncertainty that McCarthy wants the audience
to concentrate. As Bill Hardwig comments in his article “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and ‘a
world to come’”, McCarthy keeps the exact cause of the event ambiguous because he wants to
focus on the future (42). In fact, The Road is a story about the uncertain future. The whole trip of
Ling 4
the man and the boy is full of uncertainty because everything is unstable and actually impure in
the abnormal world. In this situation, the father cannot foresee what will happen in the future.
The reception of uncertainty can be captured in the dialogue motifs between the man and the
boy. When the boy asks the man whether he thinks they are going to die, the man relies “I don’t
know” for five times (106). Indeed, what the man only knows is to “carry the fire”. When the
man is going to die at the end of the story, he told the boy that “you have to carry the fire” (298).
McCarthy uses the fire as an imagery of the faith. In The Road, carrying the fire means being a
good guy. Thus, keeping faith means to pursue the goodness in some sense. Throughout the
story, the man repeatedly tells the boys to carry the fire, which means to keep the faith in the
uncertain environment. By elaborating the dialogue between the man and the boy, McCarthy
sends the message that people should also keep the faith, which means to pursue the goodness to
face the uncertain future. However, especially in the impure environment, the goodness is
complicated.
By establishing the characteristics of the boy and the man, McCarthy illustrates that being
purely good is not always practical. Thus, people should pursue the pragmatic goodness.
Throughout the story, the boy repeatedly asks the man a question: “Are we still good guys” (81).
As response, the man always replies that “we always will be” (81). Based on the boy’s
perspective, the good guys should behave purely good. In order words, good guys never eat
people, never hurt people, and never do anything bad. When he sees the little boy moving at the
rear of the house across the road alone, he tries to call back him and even let the man to give half
of the food to him (88). In order to do that, he even doesn’t care if he will die (89). However, for
the man, things are more complicated. The man knows that it is impossible to be purely good as
the boy expects, especially in such an abnormal world. In order to survive, sometimes it is
reasonable to be evil to some extent. When the big man threatens the boy’s life, he shoots man
Ling 5
without hesitation (68). When the naked people call the man for help, the man refuses and takes
the boy to flee (117). The man sometimes has to hurt others in the abnormal environment. It is
reasonable because if the man doesn’t do so, he and the boy may be in danger and even may die.
In other words, it is impractical to be purely good because the environment is impure. Thus, the
man is pragmatically good. As Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, who are both experts
in literature, states in the book Dark Night’s Dreaming, horror art is essentially a moral medium
because it extols the virtues inherent in experiencing personal tragedy without being
overwhelmed by it (3). In The Road, McCarthy establishes different characteristics between the
boy and the man to extol the man’s pragmatic goodness under the abnormal environment.
McCarthy conveys that in practice, people may not always be purely good. However, no matter
how abnormal the environment is and what the result will be, people should not abandon the
By showing the outcome of the man, McCarthy implies it is still worthwhile to keep the
faith even if the result still contradicts our faith. At the ending scene of The Road, the man dies
because of the disease. It seems irony in some sense. At first, the man begins the trip to the coast
in the south in order to survive. On the road, he always keep the faith that he can survive by
behaving good. However, when he nearly reaches the coast, he dies. In this case, he is a loser in
the game of survival. However, as I claim at the beginning, The Road is not only a story about
survival. More importantly, it is about the humanity. DeCoste states that “the substance of
McCarthy’s tale is this pair’s struggle for survival, not just of the body, but of ways of relating,
of being human” (68). It is true that the man longs for the body survival, which is the reason why
he tries to get rid of the dangerous circumstances. However, he also thinks highly of being a
human. When the man and the boy are starving, the man promises that they wouldn’t ever eat
anybody no matter how hungry they are (136). Thus, I can assert that the survival of the
Ling 6
humanity is even more important than the survival of the body for the man. Although the result
contradicts his faith, which is that he does not survive by behave good, the man is actually a
winner in the game of being a human. Thus, McCarthy points out that it is still worthwhile for us
portrays the world to reflect the contemporary American society. Nowadays, even though the
environment may not be so abnormal as the world McCarthy depicts in The Road, the ghost of
the social environment still haunts in the real world. Because of the postmodernism, social values
change quickly. Sometimes the social values may become sopposed to our faith. Sometimes
most people may change their mind to adapt to the trend. In other words, our stands, our value,
our faith may be even abnormal for the society. However, as McCarthy appeals, we should not
lose ourselves in such an eccentric environment. As long as we still believe our faith, our values,
we should have courage to keep them and fight against the environment. Although we may not
always win in this battle, it is worth to keep the faith, to always be the good guys that we believe.
Ling 7
Works Cited
Carroll, Noël. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 1.
DeCoste, D.Marcel. “‘A Thing That Even Death Cannot Undo’: The Operation of the Theological
Virtues in Cormac Mccarthy’s the Road.” Religion & Literature, vol. 44, no. 2, Summer 2012,
search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=89644101&site=ehost-
live&scope=site.
Hardwig, Bill. “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and ‘a World to Come.’” Studies in American
search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=89922682&site=ehost-
live&scope=site.
Magistrale, Tony, and Michael A. Morrison. A Dark Night's Dreaming: Contemporary American