Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Prof. Greg
28 Oct 2018
In the novel The Road, American writer Cormac McCarthy depicts the world after a
serious disaster, which is frigid and desolated. In order to find a place in which is suitable for
living, a man and his son start on the road to the south. The Road reveals issues in various fields
such as the environment protection, social injustice, gender inequality, and religion absence.
Thus, reviews of The Road diverse remarkably in terms of different perspectives. Some scholars
regard The Road as an environmental fiction and analyze it via the theories of environmental
science. Some scholars focus on the social injustice issues in this book. Personally, in this essay,
I regard The Road as a horror fiction. When we consider The Road as a horror, we may first
think about a question: what is the horror monster in The Road? It seems not obvious. Maybe,
you may argue that he monster can be the “bad guys” who rape, kill, and eat people. Indeed, the
presence of the “bad guys” horrifies the main characters, the man and the boy. However, from
my point of view, they are not the origin of the issue. In fact, the monster is the abnormal
environment, of which McCarthy uses incomplete sentences, imagery, and ideological contrast to
In The Road, the abnormal ecological and social environment is the monster, which have
serious impact on human beings. As American philosopher Noël Carroll points out in his article
“The Nature of Horror,” “In works of horror, the humans regard the monsters that they encounter
as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order” (52). Carroll clearly points out that the monster
in horror should be abnormal. In The Road, both the ecological environment and social
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environment are abnormal. For one thing, the world is barren and frigid. There is no fish
swimming in the river, no grain growing on the land. Rainstorm, earthquake, wildfire… Various
disasters happen frequently. Under this harsh environment, people is starving and suffering. In
addition, there is no country, no government, and no social organization any more. Everyone
lives individually. In order to make a living in such a chaotic social environment, most people
For one thing, McCarthy effectively establishes the horrible environment by using
incomplete sentences. In fact, in order to help audience to get involved in the situations,
McCarthy usually omits constituents deliberately when he describes the scenes. In grammar, 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
sometimes he only leaves an object. In grammar, it is obviously invalid. However, why does
McCarthy create incomplete sentences? Is he too tired to type complete sentences? Does he
forget the grammar? Probably not. McCarthy is a well-known American writer. He won the
Pulitzer Prize for The Road. Hence, it is nearly impossible that he makes mistake in creating
complete sentences. So, what is his purpose to emit constituents? Let’s take an example to
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).
Here, McCarthy uses several short and incomplete sentences to depict the country. He wants to
leave the “raw hill country,” “aluminum houses,” “interstate high-way,” and “secondgrowth
timber” in audience mind, without any additional word. Furthermore, he even leaves adjectives
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in a single sentence. “Solitary and dogged.” “Cold and growing colder.” By merely using these
adjectives, McCarthy fulfills audience expectation and reception that the ecological environment
is horrible. Actually, McCarthy uses short and incomplete sentences to keep the image flow in
audience’s minds so that audiences can get into the settings and feel the abnormal ecological
In addition, McCarthy utilizes the road as an imagery to shape the whole story in the
horror genre. Basically, the whole book is about the journey of a man and a boy on the road to
the south. On the road, they encounter many issues, people, and houses. They pass the old house
that the man lived in his neighborhood, they step into the supermarket and finally find a coke,
and they study the grand house and they encounter the “bad guys” and their “food.” Although
McCarthy designs some plots in different settings, they are just a pause. The man and the boy are
actually always on the road. However, the road does not merely represent the actual road.
Furthermore, McCarthy endows the road two more meanings. In one aspect, the road represents
the journey to fight against the ecological environment. Throughout the whole story, the man and
the boy, and other people as well, are always haunted by a significant issue—food. In the plot of
the desolate country, McCarthy writes, “Mostly he worried about their shoes. That and food.
Always food” (16). When the man finds the bunker full of food, he says “I found everything.
Everything” (147). Because the ecological environment is too harsh to grow food, food means
“everything” to make a living. Thus, the road means the journey to find food to live in such a
harsh ecological environment. In the other aspect, the road means the journey to keep the social
ethic and morality in the chaotic social environment. In the book, McCarthy uses “bad guys” and
“good guys” to divide people into two categories. On the one hand, the “bad guys” represent the
majority of people who have lost their humanities, such as the trunk people and the four bearded
men and two women in the grand house. In this game of survival, they do whatever they can.
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They ripe, kill, and eat people. There is no mercy, no love, and no “fire” in their hearts. On the
other hand, the “good guys” represent the people who keep the baseline of morality. Obviously,
the man and the boy are “good guys.” Although they are also starving, they never eat people. In
the dialogue between the boy and the man, McCarthy writes:
It is clear that they want to still be good guys. They are on the road to fight against the social
environment, in which the social ethic and morality are absent. In short, the road does not only
mean the road to the south, but also the road to fight against the abnormal ecological and social
Besides the imagery, McCarthy portrays the ideological contrast between the positive and
negative characters to reflect the impact of the abnormal environment. Especially, McCarthy
depicts a negative character: the man’s wife. She loses all the hopes and thinks it is meaningless
to live in such a disgusting and horrible environment. In the dialog between the man and his
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
and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal
This is what the wife complains to the man. Here, McCarthy uses the ghost as a metaphor.
Personally, I think the ghost implies the boy. As the woman think, the man initially had not hope
as she did. In order to find a purpose to live, the man urged her to give birth to the boy, just like
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to “cobble together some passable ghost” (59). He takes care of the boy, and protects the boy
from harm, just like “Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each
phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body” (59). From her perspective, the man
should be hopeless as well. He takes care of the boy not because he loves the boy, but because he
regards the boy as the purpose to live. Without the boy, the man is supposed to die as she does.
However, when we read through the whole book, we may find that the man is not what she
thinks of. Instead, the man is hopeful and brave, because he “carries the fire.” The reason why
the woman is such skeptical about the man is that she herself has lost the hope. She cannot
tolerate the significant change of ecological and social environment. Thus, she regards
the man and his wife, McCarthy shows the impact of the abnormal environment on people.
By drawing a picture of the abnormal ecological and social environment and showing
how it impacts on human beings, McCarthy wants to convey the idea that the ecological or social
environment may have some issues depressing human beings. In this situation, when we face it,
how can we “carry the fire” as the man and the boy do?...
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Works Cited
Carroll, Noël. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No.
1. (Autumn, 1987), pp. 51-59.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Picador, 2010.