The Hero's Journey

Contemporary American writer Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road describes a surviving journey of a father and his son after the worldwide nuclear catastrophe.By incorporating many mythological metaphors in the novel,McCarthy's The Road skillfully meets the Greek myth of Prometheus and creates a post-apocalyptic world filled with the survival crisis,the devoid humanity and the dilemmas of choosing good or evil to borrow the future to allude to the present deformity and atrophy of humanity by the cause of technocracy and rational alienation.Based on Northrop Frye's theory of the myth-archetypal criticism,this thesis explores the myth archetype,myth narrative structure and myth theme by taking the father as example and analyzing the survival journey of the father,that is,from the Prometheus-like heroic fall to the suffering of the fleshly body,and the final spiritual rebirth,to reveal the phenomena of the trust crisis and the annihilation of humanity.The main body of the thesis is divided into three parts:The second chapter mainly discusses the commonness through comparison between the father and Prometheus,the father represents a hero who is not only a survivor in the post-apocalyptic world but also a rebel against the doomed fate;“the fire” to which the father attaches great importance exceeds the simple meaning of natural ignition,but to symbol as the left spiritual homeland,namely the trust and hope,and the ethics and civilization.The third chapter pays attention to the development of the father's suffering,from the external survival crisis caused by the global nuclear explosion,to the inner annihilation of humanity manifested by cannibalism in the novel,and to the ultimate predicament of spiritual dilemma of choosing good and evil,which conforms to the U-shape narrative structure of the myth-archetypal criticism.In the last chapter,the thesis will look into the necessity of rebirth,through the reexamination of the scientific and technological ethics,the reconstruction of trust and hope can human's fate be united and the existential and spiritual predicament be resolved,which integrally manifests the circularity of the myth theme.In The Road,the father whose survival journey running through the whole novel is a heroic representative of human race.The survival predicament deforms the humanity and the dilemma of choosing good and evil sharpen the trust crisis,which can be resolved only by reconstructing the hope and trust,ethics and civilization can human fate be continued.All in all,to read The Road from the theory of myth-archetypal criticism will broaden the research scope,serve as an evidence to better understand Cormac McCarthy's rewrite of the ancient Greek myth in The Road,and probe Cormac McCarthy's contemplation of the spiritual predicament that modern civilization is confronting,his attention to the construction of spiritual homeland and his reconsideration of the modern scientific and technological civilization.