Essay Abstract

Here is an abstract of an essay I'm currently writing on The Road:

What Remains? The Last U.S. Century in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

This essay considers the remains of the last U.S. century in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. From the repurposed significance of highways and shopping carts, to gem-like soda cans and tattered road maps, McCarthy offers a novelistic extrapolation akin to Shelley’s “Ozymandias”—yet McCarthy’s narrative feels all too real at times, grounded as it is in the expansive debris field of recognizable Americana. My analysis will both carefully read The Road as a speculative look back over the ruins of the U.S., as well as offer a theory for how the form of the novel offsets the very account in question. That is, McCarthy’s style of narration and slow-time descriptions offer a counterbalance to the very mechanisms of acceleration and consumption that are causally linked to the sprawling ruins and wasteland of the novel. In an era just beyond the pronouncement of a “New American Century,” what one finds in The Road is the tattered remains of any such promise: this is a shattered state in which automobility is in its final phase, violence has become indistinguishable from survival, and surplus has gone sour. By analyzing the fragments of this post-apocalyptic literary landscape, I hope to show how one of the challenges for early 21st-century works of U.S. fiction at large has been to grapple with a looming sense of decay in progress. Throughout this essay I demonstrate how The Road participates in a tricky genre, at once dependent on a bulk of cultural knowledge (mapping, language) and ephemera (canned goods, mass produced shoes) while also predicting the failures of precisely the structures at hand.