Trauma In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

Psychoanalysis focuses heavily on the underlying meanings behind characters emotions, mental states, and personalities in a work of literature, often being a result of the author's own subconscious tendencies, personality and mental state when in the process of creating these characters. Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic novel The Road can be criticized through a psychoanalytic lens by viewing McCarthy’s inspiration behind the novel, as well as his use of symbolic dreams and trauma to inflict psychological damage and complications to his characters in the novel. Cormac McCarthy gained inspiration for his novel The Road from many sources in his life. McCarthy dedicated the novel to his son John largely in part of John’s responsibility

Trauma is described as any violent event that “overwhelms and overrides all response systems in the human person” (Shelly). As traumatic events occur and the full effect burdens the person experiencing the event, the past and present fall away into a blur, later on allowing these traumatic events to be relived in an “invasive and uncontrollable way in the present” (Shelly). These horrific and terror filled moments occur quite often for the son, one occurring in the cellar of a house the father and son are searching as starvation has begun to become an issue that is threatening their lives each passing moment. In this cellar, living humans are being kept as food sources, being ripped apart in chunks at a time to feed a group of cannibals with no other means of survival. This sight shocks and endangers both the father and son, with the father needing to repress his need and desire to kill his own son if caught by these cannibals. This scene is the first time the father's psychological battle of needing to kill his son has been put to the test, ultimately traumatizing the son for a short time after. This trauma is revisited in a new way for the son later in their journey as the father finds him in a state of complete despair and horror, saying “What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (McCarthy 198). This sight is so traumatizing and brutal that the father knows the psychological damage done is far too much for the boy to handle, acknowledging “He didn't know if he'd ever speak again” (McCarthy 199). This event sparked the flooding in of the previous experience with cannibalistic survivors, causing all the terror of before to combine with the present into one psychologically terrifying experience. The father then has