Intertextual Study Of The Doomsday Sight In The Road

Cormac McCarthy (1933-), an American novelist and playwright, has been named as one of the four major American novelists in his time with Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, and Philip Roth. The Road is one of McCarthy’s most critically acclaimed novels published in 2006 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. This thesis analyzed The Road from the perspective of intertextuality. Emerging from the literary trends of structuralism and post-structuralism, intertextuality is firstly introduced by Julia Kristeva in 1967, exposing the intertextual relations between texts by asserting that all the texts are the transformations of the preexistent texts. Intertextual devices mainly include quotation, allusion, parody, pastiche and so on.This thesis attempts to exposes the referential relations between The Road and the Holy Bible, The Road and legends of the Holy Grail in the light of intertextuality through three techniques of intertextuality:allusion, image pastiche and parody, revealing that The Road is a picture of doomsday sight. It is the inhumanity that leads to the destruction of the world, and the boy is the hope and salvation of the world.Through the interpretation of the relations between The Road, Holy Bible and legends of the Holy Grail, this thesis reveals that The Road, McCarthy’s consideration of the destiny of human beings, presented the inevitability of doomsday, the possibility of the salvation of humanity and the grand vision of building a new world.