Something New under the Unseen Sun: Escaping the Inescapable in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract

In Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize-winning tenth novel, The Road, we find for the first time in McCarthy’s body of work a loving father-son bond at the heart of the text. While many critics have commented on the dynamics of this bond, no one has yet connected this relationship to the theme of hunger for escape from modernity so ubiquitous in McCarthy’s novels, as outlined by Nick Monk in “‘An Impulse to Action, an Undefined Want’: Modernity, Flight, and Crisis in the Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian.” In that piece, published before the appearance of The Road, Monk writes that characters in the Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) and Blood Meridian are “constantly pursuing an escape route from the privileged and rational certainties of modernity, certainties that owe their debt of incarnation to the European Enlightenment” (83). He convincingly argues that those characters’ attempts to escape are, in each and every case, destined for failure. While Monk’s thesis is illuminating, he turned out to be wrong about one thing—that escape is doomed in McCarthy—only because he wrote those words before publication of The Road. This article demonstrates that in The Road, the only novel where McCarthy takes his critique of modernity to its fullest logical conclusion, we finally see characters who do successfully create a kind of escape from modernity. By taking Monk’s framework for illuminating earlier McCarthy novels and applying it to his most recent work, we find that all the major themes Monk described such as inescapability, violence, consumerism, and nomadism are as salient in The Road as in the Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian. However, because McCarthy sets The Road in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and because the father and son discover an escape—not an external and doomed escape into nomadism or animals or women, but rather one of interiority and emotional commitment—those themes found so uniformly in McCarthy’s earlier works appear twisted, inverted, or grotesquely altered in The Road.