The Road and The Fall

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their context and, through the literary process of extrapolation, creatively reconfigure these issues by placing them in a new context that generally exaggerates the extremities of said issue. In many ways these technique borrows from the ancient rhetorical technique of reductio ad absurdum, and the re-appropriation of this particular technique is itself a microcosm for the mechanisms of the authors in general.

In the post-modernist The Road there are many competing, but valid, claims as to the issue within society that McCarthy is attempting to recontextualise.

In a 2006 work of literary criticism Jonathan Cant wrote that The Road was a text concerned with debunking the myth of american exceptionalism. This essay believes that this is a valid reading, and argues that it is validated in three ways.

Firstly, the materialistic nature of modern America is likened to the “barbarous gangs of cannibals” whose injudicious, Machivellian approach to their fallen society parallels ...

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purpose and, while it provides pleasure, is surreptitiously bad. It is thus a metaphor for American culture, and to that end its state of irrelevance and impermanence within this book demonstrates that American permanence is a myth.

McCarthy is specifically projecting his conception of good and bad onto the audience through his attack on this particular notion. Having experienced issues like Hurricane Catrine and 9/11, McCarthy’s context is one that doesn’t accept America is “exceptional”, and through repurposing not only is this myth debunked, but it is outrightly shown to be evil. In this way McCarthy’s creation of a fallen world in response to context argues that even in a ...

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