Violence And Its Elimination:The Spatial Culture In Cormac McCarthy's The Road

The Road is the tenth novel written by contemporary American writer Cormac McCarthy(1933-)and is regarded as a cruel poetics.Since its publication in September2006,foreign scholars have given lots of acclaim and positive comments.Constantly appearing on the best-seller lists of The New York Times,it gains the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and only months later,it wins the James Tait Black Prize in Scotland.Unlike the road novel in general,McCarthy vividly depicts the desolate scene after the end of the world by telling a tough survival story of a father and a son,and presents readers the sincere love between them.According to Lefebvre,space is the focus of all major issues in modern society and exists everywhere.By applying his spatial theory,this thesis attempts to analyze the conflicts among different spaces and a large number of symbolic space images in the novel from three aspects of the space,namely physical space,social space and mental space.It also explores the interaction of the three spaces with violence,points out the physical background of violence and its representations in social space and finally further discusses how violence eliminates through love in mental space.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter introduces McCarthy's life and his major works briefly.The relative researches on McCarthy and his works,information about Lefebvre's spatial theory and the significance and layout of this thesis are also presented.In Chapter Two,three symbolic images,the wasteland,the fire and the natural and artificial landscape,are discussed in order to explore the physical background of violence.Chapter Three analyzes how violence is manifested in social space.For one thing,the cultural violence is expressed in the conflict between multi-culture and American culture hegemony.It is further reflected on the beautification of Westward Movement.For another thing,the thesis tries to analyze political violence from gender space and race space.It also relates this novel with the September 11 event to discuss the violence between America government and other countries.Chapter Four traces the spiritual journey of the father and the son.By analyzing the father's mentality from fragmentation to integrity and the son's from confusion to maturity,it witnesses father's redemption and son's rebirth at the end ofthis novel.Then it points out that love is the only way to eliminate violence.Chapter Five is the conclusion part of this thesis.It summarizes the general framework and main contents of this thesis,and further puts forward the anti-violence,harmonious values and attitudes of McCarthy towards life hidden in the text.