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Zihan (Johnson) Ling

Prof. Greg

Writing 39B / Rhetorical Analysis Draft 2

4 Nov 2018

The Visible and Invisible Monster of The Road

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 incomplete

world, in which disasters frequently happen and human beings are not able to grow food.

Basically, this kind of abnormal world is the monster in The Road. By using fragmented content

and incomplete sentences, McCarthy portrays the abnormal world to audience as the monster.

McCarthy uses the ghost as a metaphor of the monster to show that how the ghost of

environment haunts people and takes people’s hope. By using imagery, McCarthy tries to appeal

that people should hold their faith to survive no matter how the environment changes.

McCarthy builds up an abnormal environment as the art-horror monster. In fact, the

abnormal environment includes both ecological environment and social environment. 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 break the social ethic and morality. 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 environment are abnormal. Because the
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abnormal environment, human beings are not able to live in natural order. They have to migrate

to the south. They have to seek food. Although it is still on the earth, it is not the world that we

are familiar with.

In addition, McCarthy establishes the art-horror monster by using fragmented sentences.

In order to create a reception of incomplete, McCarthy usually omits some sentence constituents

deliberately when he describes the scenes. 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 sometimes he only leaves an object. For

example, when he describes the scene that the man McCarthy writes:

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 fragmented sentences to depict the country. He tries to lead the

audience to focus on the “raw hill country,” “aluminum houses,” “interstate high-way,” and

“secondgrowth timber” instead of other additional words According to Carroll, 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 fragemented sentences 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 the boy and the man are walking on is ghostly.

By using the ghost as a metaphor of the environment, McCarthy shows that how the

abnormal environment haunts people and takes people’s hope. In The Road, McCarthy
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establishes an especial character: the man’s wife, who loses all the hope and thinks it is

meaningless to live in such a disgusting and horrible world. Furthermore, she is pessimistic about

the man, who has strong faith to survive in the world. Before she goes to die, she argues with the

man about the man’s incentive to survive and manages to persuade the man to die. 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

and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal

nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. (59)

In this dialogue, McCarthy uses the ghost as a metaphor. From my opinion, the ghost here

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 to “cobble together some

passable ghost” (59). He takes care of the boy, and protects the boy from harm, just like to

“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 essentially is hopeless

as well. He takes care of the boy because he utilizes 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 woman’s thought is too pessimistic and skeptical. In fact, the woman is a ghost

in some sense. She is category contradicted. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the ghost is

defined as an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear and continuously haunt

people. It means that the ghost is also category contradicted. Also, when the woman complains

with the man, although she is still alive at that time, her heart has been dead. That means, she has

lost all of her hope. Thus, she also thinks that the man basically doesn’t have hope. However, the

actual ghost is the abnormal environment. According to McCarthy’s description, the woman

initially is not the ghost. Because of the changing of environment, she gradually loses her hope.
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And finally, the environment takes all of her hope and makes her also as a ghost and 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.

Furthermore, McCarthy utilizes the imagery to imply the message behind the monster,

which is that no matter how the environment changes, we should keep our faith to live. One of

the imagery is the road. 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. As long as they are on the road, they still have faith to find the

food to survive. 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. They rape,
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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:

Are we still the good guys? He said.

Yes. We’re still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be (81).

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, under such a horrible

monster, the man and the boy are still on the road, which represents keeping the faith to survive.

In fact, nowadays, even though the environment may not be so abnormal as the world

McCarthy depicts in The Road, the ghost also haunts in the real world. It is true that because of

the postmodernism, sometimes the social value may become opposite to our faith, value or

whatever the right thing we believe. It means that most people may change their mind to adjust

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 think.
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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.

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