All-pervasive Despair: McCarthy’s Dystopian Ecological Imagination In The Road

Published in 2006,The Road is the latest work of a contemporary heavyweight of American literature,Cormac Mc Carthy.Depicting the road journey taken by the anonymous father and son after a disastrous cataclysm,this novel is frequently categorized as science fiction or into “post-apocalypse” literature.Although the plot is relatively simple,the implicitly profound meanings present a vast space of scholarship,for instance,ethical study,eco-criticism,mythology interpretation,Marxism and so on.Drawing on the perspective of eco-criticism,this dissertation intends to explore the ecological outlook reflected in The Road and argues that the novel is featured by dystopian darkness.This dissertation consists of three parts.The first part focuses on the spatial presentation from two pairs of ecological terms,nature vs.culture and place vs.space,and the ecological representation of space will be elucidated.More specifically,culture is represented as a force of invasion in the space mutually constructed by nature and culture.The Arcadian ideal is shrouded in the shadow of disaster because of human traces,and the wilderness is featured by the grotesque image of devastated cityscape and bodies.The pair of place and space gives expression to liminality.Although located in a specific place,non-places are more of the spatial abstract than a sense of place;the image of home corresponds to Foucault’s heterotopia since the latent risk is ubiquitous although they provide easy entry and temporary shelter.And the second part borrows the keyword “entropy” from thermodynamics to explore the entropic imagination.The excessive waste,life in decay,the abnormal meteorological phenomena and so on all reflect the ecological disorder and dilemma.Excessive waste represents consumerism which is exactly a lifestyle of high entropy.The disappearing human and animals reflect the ecological extinction and death as entropy reaches the maximum.Varied and strange weathers also symbolize an entropic disorder.Last but not the least,the third part of the dissertation is focused on ecological ethics,discussing egocentrism manifested in the work.Egocentrism here includes anthropocentrism and the ethics of proximity.Firstly,anthropocentrism is manifested in two kinds of maps and the motif of vision.The father in the novel holds a firm belief in the oil company map but ignores the biological map reflected by the traces of animals and plants,which is in essence an anthropocentric blind faith in human intelligence.By the same token,through vision,nature is reduced to an object of aesthetics and a witness of masculine struggles without intrinsic value.As for the ethics of proximity,the father takes emotional and physical distance as the only ethical code,being indifferent to both human beings and animals far away.Such a value definitely severs the ties of the whole ecological community.Against the backdrop of eco-criticism,this paper intends to sort out Mc Carthy’s pessimistic ecological outlook in his latest work.The dystopian ecological imagination not only reflects the urgent ecological disaster looming large,but also expresses a warning of environmental crisis to readers.