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Zihan (Johnson) Ling

Prof. Greg

Writing 39B / Rhetorical Analysis First Draft

28 Oct 2018

The Visible and Invisible Monster of The Road

In the novel The Road, American writer Cormac McCarthy depicts the world after a

serious disaster, which is frigid and desolated. In order to find a place in which is suitable for

living, a man and his son start on the road to the south. The Road reveals issues in various fields

such as the environment protection, social injustice, gender inequality, and religion absence.

Thus, reviews of The Road diverse remarkably in terms of different perspectives. Some scholars

regard The Road as an environmental fiction and analyze it via the theories of environmental

science. Some scholars focus on the social injustice issues in this book. Personally, in this essay,

I regard The Road as a horror fiction. When we consider The Road as a horror, we may first

think about a question: what is the horror monster in The Road? It seems not obvious. Maybe,

you may argue that he monster can be the “bad guys” who rape, kill, and eat people. Indeed, the

presence of the “bad guys” horrifies the main characters, the man and the boy. However, from

my point of view, they are not the origin of the issue. In fact, the monster is the abnormal

environment, of which McCarthy uses incomplete sentences, imagery, and ideological contrast to

show the serious impact on human beings.

In The Road, the abnormal ecological and social environment is the monster, which have

serious impact on human beings. As American philosopher Noël Carroll points out in his article

“The Nature of Horror,” “In works of horror, the humans regard the monsters that they encounter

as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order” (52). Carroll clearly points out that the monster

in horror should be abnormal. In The Road, both the ecological environment and social
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environment are abnormal. For one thing, the world is barren and frigid. There is no fish

swimming in the river, no grain growing on the land. Rainstorm, earthquake, wildfire… Various

disasters happen frequently. Under this harsh environment, people is starving and suffering. In

addition, there is no country, no government, and no social organization any more. Everyone

lives individually. In order to make a living in such a chaotic social environment, most people

break the social ethic and morality.

For one thing, McCarthy effectively establishes the horrible environment by using

incomplete sentences. In fact, in order to help audience to get involved in the situations,

McCarthy usually omits constituents deliberately when he describes the scenes. In grammar, a

basic complete sentence should at least contain a subject, a predicate, and an object. However,

when McCarthy describes the settings, sometimes he leaves a subject as a single sentence, and

sometimes he only leaves an object. In grammar, it is obviously invalid. However, why does

McCarthy create incomplete sentences? Is he too tired to type complete sentences? Does he

forget the grammar? Probably not. McCarthy is a well-known American writer. He won the

Pulitzer Prize for The Road. Hence, it is nearly impossible that he makes mistake in creating

complete sentences. So, what is his purpose to emit constituents? Let’s take an example to

explain it. McCarthy writes:

They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill

country. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the interstate high-way

below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and growing colder

(12).

Here, McCarthy uses several short and incomplete sentences to depict the country. He wants to

leave the “raw hill country,” “aluminum houses,” “interstate high-way,” and “secondgrowth

timber” in audience mind, without any additional word. Furthermore, he even leaves adjectives
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in a single sentence. “Solitary and dogged.” “Cold and growing colder.” By merely using these

adjectives, McCarthy fulfills audience expectation and reception that the ecological environment

is horrible. Actually, McCarthy uses short and incomplete sentences to keep the image flow in

audience’s minds so that audiences can get into the settings and feel the abnormal ecological

environment that the characters face.

In addition, McCarthy utilizes the road as an imagery to shape the whole story in the

horror genre. Basically, the whole book is about the journey of a man and a boy on the road to

the south. On the road, they encounter many issues, people, and houses. They pass the old house

that the man lived in his neighborhood, they step into the supermarket and finally find a coke,

and they study the grand house and they encounter the “bad guys” and their “food.” Although

McCarthy designs some plots in different settings, they are just a pause. The man and the boy are

actually always on the road. However, the road does not merely represent the actual road.

Furthermore, McCarthy endows the road two more meanings. In one aspect, the road represents

the journey to fight against the ecological environment. Throughout the whole story, the man and

the boy, and other people as well, are always haunted by a significant issue—food. In the plot of

the desolate country, McCarthy writes, “Mostly he worried about their shoes. That and food.

Always food” (16). When the man finds the bunker full of food, he says “I found everything.

Everything” (147). Because the ecological environment is too harsh to grow food, food means

“everything” to make a living. Thus, the road means the journey to find food to live in such a

harsh ecological environment. In the other aspect, the road means the journey to keep the social

ethic and morality in the chaotic social environment. In the book, McCarthy uses “bad guys” and

“good guys” to divide people into two categories. On the one hand, the “bad guys” represent the

majority of people who have lost their humanities, such as the trunk people and the four bearded

men and two women in the grand house. In this game of survival, they do whatever they can.
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They ripe, kill, and eat people. There is no mercy, no love, and no “fire” in their hearts. On the

other hand, the “good guys” represent the people who keep the baseline of morality. Obviously,

the man and the boy are “good guys.” Although they are also starving, they never eat people. In

the dialogue between the boy and the man, McCarthy writes:

Are we still the good guys? He said.

Yes. We’re still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be (81).

It is clear that they want to still be good guys. They are on the road to fight against the social

environment, in which the social ethic and morality are absent. In short, the road does not only

mean the road to the south, but also the road to fight against the abnormal ecological and social

environment, which is actually the monster of the novel.

Besides the imagery, McCarthy portrays the ideological contrast between the positive and

negative characters to reflect the impact of the abnormal environment. Especially, McCarthy

depicts a negative character: the man’s wife. She loses all the hopes and thinks it is meaningless

to live in such a disgusting and horrible environment. In the dialog between the man and his

wife, McCarthy writes:

A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost.

Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb

and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal

nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. (59)

This is what the wife complains to the man. Here, McCarthy uses the ghost as a metaphor.

Personally, I think the ghost implies the boy. As the woman think, the man initially had not hope

as she did. In order to find a purpose to live, the man urged her to give birth to the boy, just like
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to “cobble together some passable ghost” (59). He takes care of the boy, and protects the boy

from harm, just like “Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each

phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body” (59). From her perspective, the man

should be hopeless as well. He takes care of the boy not because he loves the boy, but because he

regards the boy as the purpose to live. Without the boy, the man is supposed to die as she does.

However, when we read through the whole book, we may find that the man is not what she

thinks of. Instead, the man is hopeful and brave, because he “carries the fire.” The reason why

the woman is such skeptical about the man is that she herself has lost the hope. She cannot

tolerate the significant change of ecological and social environment. Thus, she regards

everything as meaningless, everyone as hopeless. By enhancing the ideological contrast between

the man and his wife, McCarthy shows the impact of the abnormal environment on people.

The repetition of “nothing, I am sorry, and It is okay”

By drawing a picture of the abnormal ecological and social environment and showing

how it impacts on human beings, McCarthy wants to convey the idea that the ecological or social

environment may have some issues depressing human beings. In this situation, when we face it,

how can we “carry the fire” as the man and the boy do?...
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Works Cited

Carroll, Noël. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No.
1. (Autumn, 1987), pp. 51-59.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Picador, 2010.

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