The Nature Of Society In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

Elsa Rochelson

Mr. Piorek

Apocalypse Literature

30 March 2023

The Disposable Nature of Society

In modern society, everything has been assigned a purpose or a level of significance. Every word has a definition, everything we own has some intrinsic worth, and memories and history are all preserved. In The Road, Cormac McCarthy explores the meaning of constructs that are a part of our everyday lives and how they vanish when the world falls into anarchy. As a man and his son travel the road of a post-apocalyptic world, they explore many abandoned and destroyed places of the past. All that is left of the world are broken down homes and gray ashy skies. Cormac McCarthy uses the desolate wasteland surrounding the road as well as the perspectives of

On their voyage the boy and the son stopped to camp while the night passed, while embracing the warmth of their fire, the man began to contemplate life, he imagined “The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality” (137). The structure our world is based on ceases to exist when the things that it is made up of vanish. Names and words mean nothing without what they refer to. In this segment of the novel, the man begins to reflect on the frailness of everything that makes up daily life. Language itself, the very thing used to communicate all of our history, doesn't mean anything when everything is gone. Another example of this idea is presented through the sites the man and boy pass as they wander, one of these sights were “...billboards [that] had been whited out with thin coats of paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed” (76). Billboards today often show us something of importance. They advertise products that make life easier, places to visit, movies to see, anything

Following the man removing his wallet from his pocket, disposing of the last image he held of his wife, the man compares his past life to now. He realizes there are “No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes” (32). The man is acknowledging how the construct of time was simply abandoned once the apocalypse started. There are no more weekdays, months, or even years without society existing to keep track. The modern world revolves around time entirely. Everyone has a circadian rhythm, plans are made based on time, even our age is tracked through time. The haste of which time was lost reveals the ease of which even our strongest constructs can crack. Throughout the first years of the apocalypse, the man observes what's left of the world, “Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone” (18). Within the first years, the inhabitants that are left of the world have already become “creedless