Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) is set in a postapocalyptic landscape in modern America a few years after a devastating, unspecified disaster. The landscape has been burned by savage fire storms, depleted of all animal and plant life, smothered by perpetually falling ash, and infested with marauding blood cults, who roam the land enslaving, raping and devouring all whom they meet. Trekking through this bleak and corrupted terrain along ‘the road’ towards the coast are two figures: a middle-aged father (known as ‘the man’) and his young son (‘the boy’, who we presume is about eight years old).
The narrative perspective shifts between third-person narration, which provides a detached view of the unfolding events, and free indirect discourse, as the reader is given an insight into the man’s intense thoughts and feelings. A consequence of this insight into the protagonist’s experiences is that the definite article in the novel’s title becomes highly significant. The father and son’s journey is more than a physical movement away from danger and the deadly cold across a road to the coast. Instead, travelling the road can be read as the man’s spiritual journey to believe that his child can and indeed must have a future in this world.
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