A Levinasian Reading Of The Road

Critics writing on Cormac McCarthy often claim that nihilistic themes and ethical references prevail throughout his corpus. In particular, the ethical values privileged by Cormac McCarthy are nowhere more evident than in The Road. In this Pulitzer Prize fiction, the ethical vision reveals a deep affinity with Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy, especially the ethics of the Other.In order to investigate the presence of ethical Other in McCarthy’s The Road and inquire the relationship between the Self and the Other in a morally bankrupted world, the present thesis initially explores how the interplay between mankind and the outer Other functions by examining the absence of outer Other. Then, by expounding the relation between the Self and other humans, the present thesis intends to reveal how ethics of the Other informs characters’ decisions and actions towards others. Finally, by examining the means of reconstructing inner and outer order, the present thesis suggests protagonists’ successful attempts to reconstruct their moral and spatial benchmarks.Based on the above analyses, the present thesis suggests the possibility of responsibility for the Other as a ground for human identity and relations when government and law, moral standards and religion fail to reconstruct the order of society in a post-apocalyptic future. In the light of Levinasian ethics, the thesis aims to exhibit the significance of rethinking the meaning-making so as to change the ways we have established human relationship and humanity’s relationship to the outer Other.