A Study Of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road From The Posthumanistic Perspective

Cormac McCarthy, one of the most famous contemporary American novelists and playwrights, mainly concerns himself with the issues of life and death and focuses his works on the existential conditions of contemporary human beings. His tenth novel, The Road (2006), won the Pulitzer Prize in2007.McCarthy imagines an unknown catastrophe as a touchstone to test his characters’humanity and morality in The Road. Within the catastrophe, most survivors lost their humanity and morality and some even degenerated into cannibals. Survival and moral crises overwhelmed the world. Human society and civilization were seriously threatened. The Road is quite different from McCarthy’s previous works which focus on violence and evilness, because it attaches great importance to hope and redemption. In the novel, driven by the strict ethic and moral principles which posthumanism advocates, the man and the boy try to look for a more harmonious way for survival and to help other survivors in need. The boy, who was born after the catastrophe, is depicted as the reification of God. The boy and his contemporaries who are inborn with the innate good humanity and morality will promote the harmonious progress and sustainable development of human society. Human civilization will be passed on from generation to generation.This thesis tries to analyze Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from the perspective of posthumanism. Posthumanism is a modern reflection, correction and transcendence over philosophical humanism. While humanism regards man as the center of the universe and as the measure of everything, posthumanism opposes those impractical ideas and it believes that man is only one of the components of the cosmos. Posthumanism proposes the harmonious natural view, moral and spiritual values and multicultural view. The thesis examines the cause of the catastrophe and its disastrous results----survival crisis and moral crisis, and discusses McCarthy’s implications in the novel for human beings to solve these crises. Most critics and scholars in their studies have argued that The Road in which the world is almost destroyed and human society is doomed is the culmination of violence and destruction in McCarthy’s works. However, considering human crisis, this thesis points out that McCarthy’s imagined catastrophe is just the means to foreground the novel’s posthumanistic ideas, and that survival crisis and moral crisis are caused by human race itself who firmly sticks to anthropocentrism.Different from previous studies and within the posthumanistic thoughts, this thesis holds that The Road is McCarthy’s only novel which centers on hope and redemption. With the examples of the two protagonists and other characters in The Road in terms of their different attitudes toward life and nonhumans, values orientations, moral choices and humanity, this thesis argues that it is the posthumanistic lifestyle by which the man and the boy seek to live that redeems the deserted world and makes the world full of love and hope. Actually as discussed in the thesis, the main posthumanistic lifestyle in The Road involves care and love for nonhumans, right values orientation and moral choice, and goodness and humanity. Further, the thesis highlights that the posthumanistic lifestyle in The Road is what mankind urgently needs and its posthumanistic thoughts will have a positive influence on the contemporary world and human society in terms of its social significances of warning, illumination and instruction.