Stephen Barkley
The Road is dystopian fiction like none other—lean and brutal.
The hook in dystopian fiction—and I’ve read more than my fair share—varies. Sometimes it’s a mystery novel in which the reader tries to figure out just how society arrived at its current misery. Other times it’s a constructive story of learning to transform the dystopia into something positive. None of this matters for McCarthy. In The Road there are only three ontological realities:
- Father
- Son
- Threats
The Road is a story of a father and son barely surviving in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Everything extemporaneous to the survival of this relationship is stripped from the narrative. The father and son are unnamed. Even their dialogue reflects this minimalism, quotation marks absent from the text:
You walk too fast.
I’ll go slower.
…
You’re not talking again.
I’m talking.
You want to stop?
I always want to stop.
…
I know.
We’ll stop. Okay?
Okay.
We just have to find a place.
Okay. (93)
How do you find a place where no place exists? How do you stop when to stop means to give up? These are the questions that propel McCormac’s desolate vision.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
