The Road To Mankind’s Redemption-a Perspective Of Ethical Literary Criticism Of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Cormac McCarthy is considered as one of the most prominent alive writers incontemporary America. He is noted for bloodstained description with endless imagination.However he is also a writer with strong sense of social responsibility who is concerned aboutthe social ethical problems in modern times.The Road is McCarthy’s tenth and latest novel which wins Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Thisnovel is like a dim and poetic dirge presented to the world by McCarthy’s objective, incisiveand callous manner. Through the nightmarish residue of America, a haggard father and hisyoung son attempt to flee the oncoming winter and head towards the southern coast. On theroad, they have to endure freezing cold and killing starvation. Meantime, they are on guardagainst the potential disoperation from other survivors, especially the anthropophagi. Thecomplete bloodbath scene in this novel shows no lessening of brutality, but it is the backdroprather than its main action. In a deeper sense, the father and son in the novel are spokesmen ofhumankind in doomsday. Their arduous struggle on the road to survival reveals the road tohuman’s redemption.Ethical literary criticism is a new research method which analyses and interprets literaryworks on the standpoint of ethics. Professor Li Dingqing advocates that literary works shouldbe analyzed in four ethical relationships: the human and nature, the human and society, thehuman and others, the human and themselves. With the guidance of this theory, the thesisattempts to explore how the father and son survive the life or death journey by handling the fourethical relationships. The concrete content is as follows:Chapter One discusses how the father and son in the novel deal with the relationship withnature harmoniously on the abandoned land. Their respect and dependence on nature under thenatural ethical conception is the foundation of their survival. Chapter Two analyzes how thefather and son sustain the fragile relationship with society in the nihilistic world. The rightattitude to society conformed to social ethical demand is to rebuild the inheritable relationshipwith the social civilization.Chapter Three explores how the ethical relationships with others influence the father and son’s threatening confrontation with destruction in the novel. Pursing goodness to others,including the father’s boundless love to the son, the trustworthy fraternal love between the goodpeople and the compassion to the weak, is the ethical assurance of the anguished fighting withthe depravity in the distorted circumstances. The last chapter illustrates how the father and sonrealize individual transcendence in respective ethical dilemmas. The endeavor on perfection ofoneself is the precondition of survival in the calamity.In summary, the father and son’s road of seeking survival in the novel stands for theredemption road of humankind in doomsday. With elaborate description of the father and son’stough journey, McCarthy offers advices on the ways to human’s redemption. The road tohuman’s rebirth at the end of the day requires the reconstruction of ethics embodied in fourkinds of ethical relationships. Rebuilding the four different relationships properly andreestablishing the normal ethical order can lead the road to people’s promise and prosperity,even in the catastrophe.