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Zihan (Johnson) Ling

Prof. Greg

Writing 39B / Rhetorical Analysis Final Draft

14 Nov 2018

Beyond Survival in the Abnormal World

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.

By using fragmented sentences to describe the abnormal environment, McCarthy

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
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sometimes he only leaves an object. For example, when he describes the setting after the man

leaves the lake near to his uncle’s farm, 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 create a reception of incompletion. He

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.

McCarthy establishes the special character—the man’s wife—as an example to reflects

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
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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)

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
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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
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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

social morality and should pursue the pragmatic goodness.

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
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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

to keep the faith even if the result is opposed to our faiths.

McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world is not just a fictional world. Indeed, McCarthy

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.
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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.

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,

pp. 67-91. EBSCOhost,

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

Naturalism, vol. 8, no. 1, Summer 2013, pp. 38–51. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=89922682&site=ehost-

live&scope=site.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Picador, 2010.

Magistrale, Tony, and Michael A. Morrison. A Dark Night's Dreaming: Contemporary American

Horror Fiction. University of South Carolina Press, 1999.