"Maps And Mazes"-----the Spatial Reading Of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

As one of the most well-known masterpieces of contemporary American literature, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was published in2006, has been studied from various perspectives at home and abroad. Employing Frederick Jameson’s post-modernism as the theoretical framework, this thesis attempts to do a spatial reading of this novel by centering on three terms, namely map, maze and the road, exploring the development of the human civilization.Focusing on the term-map, Chapter One analyzes the oriented image of the world that industrialization carves in the landscapes and human minds. As a diagram, map represents the geographic space of the world, which is extremely useful for readers to find their locations and get to know the world. The oil-company road map in The Road symbolizes the industrial society and contains two important concepts:oil and road. There is also a map in the father’s heart, which is the memory of the lost world and helps him locate himself in the post-apocalyptic world.Chapter Two tries to get a connection between maze and the postmodern space, which both leave people the sense of disorientation. As the result of the development of industrialization, the maze in The Road is such a typical post-modern space as Fredrick Jameson discussed, in which the subject and historicity are disappeared while the space turns into fragments. People won’t survive merely by their own efforts in this world. Meanwhile the story happens in an unknown period in history, and people there can not get any conjunction with their past. The world is a silent, barren dessert, so does the textual space. The pastiche of the texts employed in The Road is in coherence to the fragmentary space.Chapter Three discusses how the protagonists through their traverse preserve the goodness in the human beings and establish the harmonious relationship between individuals and their outer surroundings, including the history, nature and others, which may be the prescripts McCarthy makes for the development of human civilization. During their journey, the father tries to pass down the hope of survival and the love for his son; while the son, who was born in post-apocalyptical world, has developed the cooperation model of living by his perceiving, receiving and active adapting to the new environment, which is the origin of a new culture in which people get along well with nature and others.According to the discussion above, the readers are expected to realize that McCarthy skillfully utilizes the term map and road to constructs a postmodern maze where the subject, historicity and interpretation are totally different from the modern society. The father suffers from the memory of the lost world, suggesting a moving map of the decaying industrial society. The son’s road is to draw a new map of the post-apocalyptic world, passing down via his survival.