Doom And Remolding In Cormac McCarthy’s Novel The Road

As one of the most important novelists in contemporary America, Cormac McCarthy is deemed as the successor of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner by many critics. Since the release of his first novel The Orchard Keeper in1965, McCarthy has published ten novels until now and has received international acclaim.McCarthy’s tenth book, The Road was published in2006. This book has been widely approved ever since its release. In2007,The Road was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction which is McCarthy’s greatest literary achievement to date. Judging from the pouring criticism in its favor since its publication, The Road, together with the Border Trilogy, is bound to go down as a milestone in McCarthy’s writing career and a lasting masterpiece in American literature. It is a post-apocalyptic tale which describes a journey taken by the father and his young son in a wretched world where almost all lives and civilization are destroyed by an unnamed cataclysm.This thesis intends to make a brief study of doom and remolding by analyzing the arduous journey of the father and his son.In Chapter One, the doom of world is analyzed from the perspectives of human inner world as well as the society. The once vibrant nature is completely destructed by the catastrophe, transforming into a dark and cold one. Deprived of food and shelter once offered by nature, human beings are banished in a godless land without faith and identity, which result in the doom of their inner world. Human being, undoubtedly, is the most important element of a society. Therefore, the fall down of human inner world inevitably causes the collapse of society as embodied by the disappearance of language, trust and humanity.Chapter Two illustrates that the remolding of human inner world relies on the rekindling of hope. By analyzing the father and his son’s process of going through various kinds of perils, this thesis indicates that faith and identity endow them with hope and courage to move on in the scorched land. Therefore, only by rebuilding faith and redefining identity, can the remolding of inner world be possible. The last chapter is about the remolding of society. As social beings, humans must rely on society to survive. The remolding of human inner world on the one hand inspires humans to move on, on the other hand makes the remolding of society possible. By analyzing the father and son’s actions of fighting with the evil, spreading love to strangers and forming alliance with the good, this thesis points out that the morbid society can be healed by nothing but goodness and love.To sum up, this thesis arrives at a conclusion that by depicting a destructive cataclysm suggestively caused by nuclear war, McCarthy expresses his concerns for human living conditions and social development. This thesis further indicates that The Road not only successfully brings these human dilemmas to the foreground in a delicate work of art, but also conveys a powerful notion of hope that human beings are equally capable of immense love and goodness in general, and that the transmission of love and goodness will eventually make the world a much better one.