The Road: Ecocriticism and Memory

Ecocriticism, or the interdisciplinary study of literature to explore the relationship between the natural world and humanity, has been one of my favorite subjects in English because our class was able to critically analyze the portrayal of environments in several childhood favorites, such as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lorax. Because I did not think much of the connection between a book’s environment and plot structure as a child, our discussions about, for example, the efficacy of the Lorax as a spokesperson for the environment, were remarkable. While we have finished the ecocriticism unit, I still wonder about whether I have misinterpreted any other books that I have read before. For this post, I will look at one of my favorite books of all time, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which can be analyzed with both ecocriticism and memory. You can read more about this novel here.

First of all, The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel set somewhere in the United States at an undescribed time. Both of the main characters, an anonymous father and his son, are in the middle of their expedition on the “road” to the south coast, in hopes of a better life. The ubiquitous anonymity of the novel’s characters and objects adds to the bleakness of the Kafkaesque environment. Indeed, the ecocritical aspect of the book is obvious: the landscape is barren and uninhabitable due to an unknown but possibly human-caused catastrophe. On the road, the father and son often come upon towns and cities that once thrived but now only carried remnants of the old world, such as billboards and homes.

Source Link: tinyurl.com/mk55ccm

For me, the main characters’ harsh expedition seems to be an experiment on how the environment informs human behavior. The father and son are sometimes forced to make difficult choices and even compromise their morality. For example, when they meet a severely hurt man on the road, the boy wishes to help him out of compassion, yet the father states they do not have the resources. In addition, due to the lack of food in the barren environment, the road is full of cannibalistic bandits who kidnap people and lock them in basements for later. The existence of such “bad” people inevitably leads to the father and son’s creation of an ostensibly simplistic dichotomy between “good” and “evil.” While such a distinction may seem childish in a normal setting, the fact that they identify themselves to be “good” amidst the nightmarish environment constantly reminds them of their duty to “carry the fire.”

In addition to ecocriticism, The Road is clearly a novel about memory. The father has several experiences in which the border between the world of the past and the current post-apocalyptic reality seems to blur. For example, the father has flashbacks about his wife, who left him and the son sometime before the expedition. He also remembers that he delivered the son himself, which explains why he treats the son as an extremely precious object. Like I stated before, the dilapidated communities act as skeletons of the old world, with empty barns, cars, and even trains scattered about, making especially the father sentimental about the past.

In the end, the main characters do reach their destination, but for the sake of those who have not read the excellent novel yet, I will not elaborate any further. It has been a while since I read The Road, and I remember that I had chills whenever the father and son encountered the cannibalistic bandits. But other than that, I never consciously paid attention to the environment at the time. As a result, when I revisited the novel with the topics of ecocriticism and memory in mind, I realized that human relationships were portrayed as so malleable and dependent on the environment.