In The Road by Cormac McCarthy endless reports of building campfires, preparing food, ransacking desolate buildings, and fixing various objects set the tempo of the narrative. Yet for all its descriptions revolving around the tedious practicalities of securing subsistence in the post-apocalyptic world, The Road is perceptibly engaged with the symbolic and the mythic. It is quite reasonable since, as David Eder put it, “mankind has invariably found it helpful to find a refuge in myths to relieve its perplexity and to mitigate its unhappiness” (81). This paper is concerned with the myths of Prometheus, the frontier, and progress that permeate the tissue of McCarthy’s work. These myths are additionally approached from the ecocritical perspective.
Fire occurs continuously in the novel both physically and metaphorically. It is depicted in a conflicting way: there is an ominous fire that has burned down the biosphere and polluted it with smoke and ash; but there is also a fire that brings comfort, light and warmth and which can be used practically to one’s benefit. Then there is the fire, less of an element and more of a mental construct that recurs in the father and son’s rapport. They identify themselves as the ones who “carry the fire” (McCarthy 87) which serves to distinguish them from “the bad guys” (McCarthy 80) and establish a purpose for them to keep moving on. The exact meaning of ‘the fire’ is open to interpretation. There is enough textual evidence for a religious reading not to be out of place, e.g. the father fancies his son as a god. It may be also associated with secular values, as for instance humanity, civilization, and social progress; these values come close to extinction in the gruesome and barren setting of The Road, a site of dissolution of traditional social norms. All in all, the sacred and the profane are not far apart in the novel.
The idea of ‘carrying the fire’ does have a vein of divinity, which in the Western culture is rooted in the ancient Greece and the myth of Prometheus. He was a brilliant, rebellious Titan, the creator of mankind, who in a charitable and humanistic spirit decided to steal fire from Zeus and give it to the people, for which both he and the recipients were cruelly punished. The story has reverberated in our collective unconscious for ages. In The Road it occurs that this ancient gift of fire that allowed for technological progress and the general development of the humankind might have led to a progress trap of a sort and eventually to the end of the world as people had known it. Nevertheless, the father and his saintly son relive the Promethean scenario to some degree: they are suffering in the name of cultivating humanistic values in an environment that seems to no longer accommodate them.
According to Daniel Luttrull, who disagrees with preceding ecocritical interpretations of The Road, McCarthy engages in the rereading of the promethean myth with a view to supporting the essentialist claim that “humanity (or, more specifically, humaneness) does not rely upon the biosphere but rather stems from something innately human that transcends environment, finding its origin somewhere within the human consciousness or soul” (24). However, this perspective is focused on the authorial literary use of the myth of Prometheus as an intertext while downplaying the functional role of myth production in societies and its effects. In other words, Luttrull does not treat the myth of Prometheus as an archetypal narrative that as a part of our cultural legacy latently influences our mindset and behaviour. The Road can be seen as a novel about the power of myths to determine the way we think — how we perceive ourselves and the Other, or how we conceptualise the world and our position in it.
Furthermore, although Luttrull offers in his paper a short summary of ways that the myth of Prometheus figures in literature and philosophy, he is not concerned with the politics of its use. Myths — understood more generally, without reference to any particular mythology — are not ideologically transparent, no matter how universal experiences they convey. Their meaning depends largely on the context in which they function. The myth of Prometheus has proved to be a singularly evocative story as it has been often embraced by reformers and utopian thinkers of various kind. In the post-apocalyptic context provided in The Road, the protagonist's will to maintain conventional humanistic values does become a somewhat utopian statement (Luttrull 30). Framing his humanistic undertaking in Promethean terms may have been motivated by the protagonist's need to produce a positive self-image. 'Carrying the fire' is an excuse that gains him moral credentials necessary for legitimising his otherwise risky or morally ambiguous actions.
Using a mythical frame to enhance one's positive self-image is a mechanism especially present in colonial narratives. For instance, the ancient Promethean undercurrent is fairly noticeable in the myth of the American frontier. In this case the bloodshed that the westward expansion occasioned was excused by the need to bring the light of the civilization to the savage territories. Subjugating the wilderness and its inhabitants was defined as ‘manifest destiny’. The myth of Prometheus is a politically problematic narrative in American culture.
McCarthy’s novel transcends the tale of expansion and subjugation of the wilderness in the name of imperialistic ideals. However, The Road does hark back to the times of the Wild West. The post-apocalyptic setting of the novel is the new frontier for its protagonist. As Chris Walsh observes,
The Road is fundamentally concerned with many of the mythic cornerstones of the American imagination. It has a savage other haunting the woods and trails, it is unsettled and thoroughly undomesticated, it is as violent and bloody as the landscapes McCarthy has explored in his western works, as the father and son forge out into a new, unknowable terrain; they may not "ride on" here, but they do keep trudging on with their shopping cart (49-50).
The ashy, post-apocalyptic open landscape, in which the majority of The Road is set, is somewhat similar in its aesthetic to descriptions of the Great Plains in Western fiction. There is an episode with a desolate train in McCarthy's novel, the symbol of the American westward expansion. There are antagonistic gangs of “bad guys” terrorising innocent people. The protagonist carries a gun that appears in the text often enough to be considered his attribute, which likens him to a nomadic cowboy. It can be considered plausible then that in The Road the protagonist’s ethos — comprising notions of his moral superiority, self-reliance, strength, and a sense of duty — is informed by the American Old West tradition and the myth of the frontier.
Chris Walsh suggests that McCarthy unironically sets his post-apocalyptic Western not in the West but, most probably, in the South. He introduces the South a sort of a lost Arcadia that, after all, still holds promise. In Walsh’s opinion, thanks to this McCarthy
succeeds in reviving the most cherished geocentric American myth of the frontier, of a new physical, imaginative and spatial beginning. In what is a major symbolic gesture McCarthy re-inscribes this national myth; in so doing, he reverses the westerly spatial movement of his own characters, and we leave the boy as he continues to carry his light into the South (54).
It is arguable whether there really is sufficient basis for such enthusiasm. Walsh’s approach stems from his positive value judgement of the myth of the frontier. He further projects his zealous appreciation of the frontier myth onto McCarthy. Walsh's enthusiasm is ideological in its nature — for some the frontier may have negative connotations, especially for the native Americans. Some could even claim that it is more than predictable and not necessarily laudable that the protagonist of The Road, a white cisgender American man, acts like a cowboy in the time of great danger. The revival of the Old West myths in a hopeless post-apocalyptic scenery is not altogether convincing — it can be seen as a “failed [pretention] to order and stability from another era” (Walsh 53). Perhaps The Road rather than praising questionable myths in fact merely portrays the American approach to dealing with crisis that rests on habitual mythologizing.
Falling back on Wild West myths is certainly not as bad as reverting to cultism, as some people in the novel did, but ultimately might be a not less misguided means of dealing with a catastrophy. In case of The Road, it is necessary for us to get real, to put it bluntly. We have to recognise that an “ashen, wasted” ecosystem is not merely an “ostensibly dystopian” (Walsh 54) backdrop for human drama. An obliterated biosphere is not a nuisance that has to be overcome, or an enemy that should be dealt with, as the wilderness has been frequently projected in Westerns. The natural environment portrayed by McCarthy in the long run does not sustain existence of humans whatsoever, let alone any Promethean cowboys with exceptional qualities and pressing duties to human civilisation. The fact is perhaps not sufficiently pronounced in the novel.
The Road elevates the business of preserving humanity by suggesting how beautiful humanity is. McCarthy strives to present humanity in a positive light. He offers the reader profoundly likeable main characters, (of which one, just in case, is designed to be an unnaturally mature child for its age). Their relationship stands for the best in us as a species. It almost makes one forget about the cannibals, as if they were present in the novel only to provide a dark contrasting background that would accentuate the commendable lambent beauty of the father-son relationship, an argument for the value of human life.
Additionally, McCarthy avoids stating overtly whether the apocalypse was man-made or not, so humanity gets away with its sins, e.g. rampant spreading of the technosphere at the expense of gradual deterioration of the biosphere. McCarthy does not criticise how destructive human presence has occured to be for the planet Earth since we have discovered fire. Ruins of the cities are depicted in the novel with a nostalgia, in a way that reflects merely the vulnerability of our civilization. If the apocalypse in the novel was caused, for instance, by an all-out nuclear war, the message would be completely different — these obliterated cities could be then a warning against the unchecked human agency in the age of the Anthropocene. All in all, in The Road the death of the biosphere does not appear as touching as the death of the man. Annihilated nature is more of a predicament for the protagonist. If not for its redeeming coda, one could conclude from McCarthy’s novel that human life has an inherent value whereas the biosphere does not; the loss of nature becomes painful only when it ceases to support humans.
Apart from the myth of Prometheus and the myth of the frontier, The Road is informed by a myth that has a paramount influence in the contemporary Western society, the myth of progress. It got traction during the Age of Enlightenment; it buttressed the Industrial Revolution and has continued to propel us ever since. We have in fact internalised the myth of progress so deeply that the urge to constantly move forward seems obvious while a lack of this urge a deviation from the norm, a sign of weakness, despondency, or lack of determination. Therefore it is not surprising that in The Road the man cannot imagine stopping. Even in the face of annihilation of the biosphere the ideal of progress persists (in the form of ‘the fire’ that has to be carried at all costs). In the novel not moving forward is associated with death. McCarthy structures the narrative in a way that does not afford any alternative than to constantly move forward. The protagonist's son, imbued with reassuring myths that elevate his existence and lend a heroic tinge to his journey, plods forward after the father's death. McCarthy asserts that “goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again” (McCarthy 300) because believing in the myth of progress entails that “civilisation has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction” (Bury 5).
What emerges now is the question of whether the protagonist makes a good decision by not taking his son with him when he dies, as he originally intended (McCarthy 298). It is not to be answered in this paper. By considering the myths that inform the shape of The Road one may possibly shed light on why McCarthy has the protagonist aligned with life, apart from the essentialist explanation proposed by Daniel Luttrull. The myth of Prometheus favours the brave and the suffering; due to the myth of the frontier and the particular notion of wilderness that it promotes, the protagonist is sufficiently detached from nature to conceive of a future without it; and the myth of progress takes the future for granted. These myths latently determine the man’s behaviour and form his ethos, which he passes down to his son. McCarthy’s authorial choices may be also affected by the dubious myths without his awareness, which may account for certain shortcomings of The Road in terms of its treatment of the environment.
David Eder defines a myth as “a construction adopted by those taking part in a great social movement or at any rate in a movement that seems to them great” (Eder 81). This movement is “represented as a great struggle between them and the forces of opposition […] in which they feel assured of ultimate victory” (Eder 81). In a way the whole story of The Road is a myth, then. There is, however, a fundamental issue inherent in embracing any myth in a post-apocalyptic world pictured by McCarthy in his novel: it is questionable whether there can be a victory over a dead biosphere.
Angelika Samoraj, MA I
Utopia and Dystopia in Literature
Dr Michał Palmowski
17 February 2019
Minor stylistic improvements added to the text: 18 April 2023
Works Cited
Bury, John Bagnell. “Introdution”. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth. 1920. EPUB ed., Project Gutenberg, 2010, pp. 4-38.
Eder, David. "The Myth of Progress". Brit. J. Med. Psychol., 1932. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, vol. 35, no. 1, 1962, pp. 81-90. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8341.1962.tb00506.x.
Luttrull, Daniel. “Prometheus Hits The Road: Revising the Myth”. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2010, pp. 20-33. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909408.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. 2006. Picador, 2008.
Walsh, Chris. “The Post-Southern Sense of Place in The Road”. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 6, Special Issue: The Road, 2008, pp. 48-54. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909381.
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