Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse—The Loneliness after the Doom

What will a post- apocalypse world feel like, after the doom of human civilization? Cormac McCarthy answered this question in his Pulitzer Prize-Winning novel The Road.

McCarthy’s language is simple, calm but serious, like an old man telling a story that is full of vicissitudes and desolation. The novel has two parallel but complementary lines. One is a moving family story about a long journey of a father and his son, and the other is a stock-still epic of the world after apocalypse. McCarthy’s apocalypse is a feeling of loneliness which emerged from the doom of civilization, society, and humanity. 

Unlike most of the post-apocalyptic movies or literatures presenting the big picture of apocalypse directly, McCarthy didn’t write about why the world went into the end. Although he left us a huge blank, the post-apocalyptic world he presented is real and tangible. McCarthy’s apocalypse is not just one scene or two, but a world hiding throughout the whole novel. It is hard for readers to catch those small fragmented descriptions and conversations, which distributed all over the long journey of the father and son. But once you pick them up and combine them, you will see how successfully the author created his unique post-apocalyptic world. McCarthy’s rich imagination describes what a dead world will look like: there are falling down burnt trees (97), “black water” (130), “dried corpse” (80), “ashen scabland” (16), “gray sky” (80) and empty towns (150). In the book review of New York Times, William Kennedy said the novel is “consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization” (1). McCarthy is good at using small but symbolic scenes to present the big image of apocalypse and conveying the immersive feeling of loneliness after apocalypse. 

In the novel, there are many constructions from the previous civilization, which is filled with sadness and loneliness after doom. As Mark Fisher wrote in his article: “McCarthy’s novel is harrowing because its post-apocalypse is not a time of interregnum, a temporary interruption in civilization preceding its restoration: it is the long, drawn-out end” (14). Here is an example from a conversation between father and son:

What is that, Papa?

It's a dam.

What's it for?

It made the lake. Before they built the dam that was just a river down there. The

dam used the water that ran through it to turn big fans called turbines that would

generate electricity.

To make lights.

Yes. To make lights.

Can we go down there and see it?

I think it's too far.

Will the dam be there for a long time?

I think so. It's made out of concrete. It will probably be there for hundreds of years. Thousands, even.

Do you think there could be fish in the lake?

No. There's nothing in the lake (19-20).

This is a very short conversation, but it is a perfect example showing how McCarthy use simple scene to depict the apocalypse. There are several strong contrasts in the conversation. The first contrast is between the ruins of human civilization and the no-longer existed prosperity of human world. The dam is a relic of the previous civilization and it produced electricity, the most important energy of our industrial world. But now the civilization is gone, there will be no more bulbs lit in the darkness, and the dam will still stand there alone for thousands of years. It expresses the loneliness that survived after the apocalypse as a connection to a previous civilization. This kind of contrast is very common in apocalypse theme movies and literatures. In the 2007 post-apocalyptic film I am Legend, there are numerous descriptions of famous ruins: the ruin of Brooklyn Bridge, the weedy Times Square. The second contrast is between the eternal substance and the short life of living things. Both the father and son and the dam is the remaining of a passing civilization. But they will die one day, like the fish in the lake. 

The road, both as the title of the novel and the thread of the long journey, is another example of presenting the loneliness from the doom of civilization. Roads remind us of the industrial world once we were living in. As Susan Balée wrote: “Just as the Romans left roads throughout Europe as reminders of their civilization, so too the Americans leave their ribbons of macadam. Only in this fallen civilization, roads that once signified freedom and mobility now evoke the terror of highway robbers and murderers” (518). The roads “used to belong to the states” (McCarthy 43), and “there's not any more states” (43) now. This expresses the same loneliness as the dam—the loneliness of ruins of the pass civilization. 

More specifically, the doom of civilization is the fall of capitalism and commercialism. In Brian Donnelly’s analysis of the symbolic scene in the novel, when the father gave his son a can of coke, he wrote that “the extinction of Coke marks the text’s endeavor to demonstrate in the severest sense the discrepancy between reality and ‘the Real Thing,’ the last representative of a consumer fantasy that is no longer tenable” (73). Mark Fisher also discussed in his article that this small scene showed a “utopia” of the longer existed world which once has “plenty” of commodities (14).

McCarthy also presented the loneliness caused by the doom of social structure. There is a small scene in the novel where the father picked up a phone and called his father’s house (7). In this symbolic scene, there is a very strong expression of loneliness. The telephone represents a previous method of social communication, but the social structure no longer exists now. Dialing a phone that no one can answer is symbolic as all of the father’s relatives were dead and he could no longer connect to human society. Once the boy asked about the father’s friends:

What happened to them?

They died.

All of them?

Yes. All of them.

Do you miss them?

Yes. I do (59-60).

This is also showing a kind of social loneliness, after the break down of social structure. Mark Fisher wrote about this in his article: “The man and the boy exist in a world in which Margaret Thatcher’s dictum has come true: here there really is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families” (14).

The loss of humanity also contributes to the loneliness after doom. In McCarthy’s apocalypse, most of the survivors became cannibals. The father and son are some of the few people who still hold their principles on humanity, which they called “carrying the fire” (83). They not only have to escape from cannibals, but also have to avoid the corruption of their own human nature. When humanity no longer exists in the world, they can trust no one else. This is a kind of loneliness.

The loneliness is much stronger because of the contrast between the post-apocalyptic world and the father-son relationship. Their love towards each other is in stark contrast to the deadly environment. They depend on each other in this lonely world. The father loved his son and protected him, and the son is the father’s reason for living. They are not lonely because of each other. But they are so fragile and cannot live without each other. We keep worrying about the future loneliness of the little boy when the author indicated that the father’s health was going worse. 

The apocalypse theme is the central to the novel. Every single word in the novel is filled with the loneliness of the post-apocalyptic world. We are not only moved by the love between the father and the son, but also shocked by the desolation of the post-apocalyptic world. McCarthy builds a real and tangible world filled with a strong feeling of loneliness which emerged from the doom of civilization, society, and humanity.