The Mytheme of Way in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract

The way or road is one of the central mythemes in the world literature. It is used as a bone-structure in numerous mythic and literary narratives. In a sense, the myth of Sisyphus,  the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parsifal and other medieval Grail romances, Dante’s Divina Commedia, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Goethe’s Faust, James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi and The Waste Land and many other masterpieces of the world literature are embodiments of the mytheme of the way and the mythic motive of quest. The forms of its literary embodiment of the mytheme vary from one literary epoch to another depending on the author’s world outlook and method. As Temur Kobakhidze puts it, in the final analysis, two separate journeys, the historic and the spiritual one, can be presented in any work. The historic journey can take place in the profane time of everyday events, while the spiritual quest endures in the sacred space-time, serving as a binding principle for what can be described as the mythopoeic chronotope of the spiritual quest (Kobakhidze 2008: 94).  

The narrative structure of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road is shaped by the mytheme of way or road. A father and his son “journey” alone through burned America. The land is covered with ash, it is cold enough to crack stones, the sky is dark. Cannibals, marauders and lawless bands stalk the road.  Their destination is the coast, although they do not know what, if anything, awaits them there. The association with Sisyphus comes to mind immediately – all their efforts to escape the same dangers and overcome the same obstacles endlessly seems to be aimless and even if they reach their destination and survive, there is no sense in survival – it is the world in which no hope remains. In this sense, the narrative structure of the “road” is modelled on the myth of Sisyphus. At the same time, the apocalyptic vision of the total devastation is a literal/physical actualization of T. S. Eliot’s metaphoric image of the “waste land”. All characters, but one, are nameless – McCarthy depicts the all-human condition.

While the book details the journey, it is not specified what cataclysm has destroyed the industrial civilization and almost all life. One might assume that the protagonists face the results of Anthropocene – a new geological epoch of significant human impact on geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change. Anthropocene is inevitably followed by the era of Posthumanism that is not anthropocentric and therefore not centered in Cartesian dualism. It seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the human and inhuman (the animal and the technological).  

However, it does not mean that what McCarthy offers is the totalization of the posthumanist epistemology. The novel is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness, love and empathy for others that keeps two people alive in the face of total post-apocalyptic devastation.