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Linguistic Disintegration in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Cormac McCarthy's The Road propels the reader along a

horrifying journey through the nuclear winter of post-

apocalyptic America. Following an unnamed father and son

through the fiercest and bleakest of landscapes, readers

breathlessly watch as the two battle inconceivable odds in

their simple quest for survival. In as realistic a context

as possible, McCarthy examines not only the physical, but

also the psychological consequences of cataclysm. His is a

world where not only the planet collapses, but civilization

as well: speech, writing, oral tales, memories and dreams

disintegrate and decay, as do almost all articulations and

representations of language. Ironically, the lushness of

McCarthy's prose swells as the words and semantic trappings

of this post-holocaustic earth vanish, providing the reader

with if not hope, at least some sense of reprieve.

Although the catalyst of the calamity is never

specifically named, one can infer that it is indeed the

aftermath of a nuclear war. The text does describe "a long

shear of light and then a series of low concussions" which

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Saliba give rise to "a dull rose glow" (McCarthy 52) that lends

credence to this idea. In this setting, a dust-cloud

surrounding the Northern Hemisphere (or perhaps the entire

planet) has rendered the process of photosynthesis null,

killing almost all edible plant-life. As a direct result,

almost all animal-life is destroyed and many humans, in

their desperate struggle for life, have resorted to

enslaving and cannibalizing one another.

The phenomenon depicted is almost directly in line with

the sort of post-nuclear war scenario that noted scientist,

Carl Sagan and his colleagues describe in their 1983 study:

Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions:

We knew that nuclear explosions, particularly

groundbursts, would lift an enormous quantity of…

soil particles into the atmosphere…Airbursts over

cities and…military installations make fires and

therefore smoke… the amount of sunlight at the

ground [would be] too dark for plants to [conduct]

photosynthesis…land temperatures [would drop] to

minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit…virtually all crops

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and farm animals, at least in the Northern

Hemisphere, would be destroyed…Most of the human

survivors would starve. (pars. 12-17)

Inspiration drawn from this scientific research is

evident in The Road. As "scientists concerned about the long-

term consequences of nuclear war used new theories of mass

extinctions to develop the notion of a 'nuclear winter'"

(Culver 392), McCarthy used the same theories as fodder to

create his own dystopic narrative. Meditations upon this

theme are in line with McCarthy's own keen interest in

scientific matters, evidenced by the fact that the author is

a mainstay fixture at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico,

an organization "devoted to creating a new kind of

scientific research community, one emphasizing multi-

disciplinary collaboration" (Santa Fe Institute par. 1).

In a recent interview, the author discusses his

"extensive reading in 20th-century physics, the philosophy

of mathematics and animal behavior" (Woodward 2005). "What

physicists did in the 20th century was one of the

extraordinary flowerings ever in the human enterprise," he

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Saliba said, "They changed reality" (Woodward 2005). But McCarthy

created a reality of his own—one that tracks a "father’s

loving efforts to shepherd his son [through a landscape

made] wrenching by the unavailability of food, shelter,

safety, companionship or hope in most places where they

scavenge to subsist" (Maslin par. 11). What's described in

The Road is not merely the extinction of a species or a

planet; he portrays the human-oriented experience of the

demise of civilization.

The first issue worthy of examination is McCarthy's

own craft with language and how it both reflects and offsets

his fictional dystopia. Much like a modernist poet, McCarthy

de and reconstructs the very form of prose. "Parataxis [is]

in the first sense… the most salient feature of McCarthy's

[writing]" (Eaton 167). Fragmented sentences that mirror

the processes of sensory perception are scattered through

the text and evoke the fractured status humankind has found

itself in, contributing to the ominous mood:

In the morning they went on. Desolate country. A

boarhide nailed to a barndoor. Ratty. Wisp of a

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tail. Inside the barn three bodies hanging from

the rafters, dried and dusty among the wan slats

of light. There could be something here, the boy

said. There could be some corn or something. Let's

go, the man said. (McCarthy 17)

The very fact that "bodies hanging from rafters"

are noted so casually and evoke no reaction from the son

shows us how very dismal the universe McCarthy has created

is. The drumming, steady rhythm evoked by the repetition of

sentence fragments lulls and encapsulates the reader within

the dreary atmosphere and the imagery is bleak at best.

The lack of names, apostrophes and quotation

marks in the novel also provokes an eerie sense of

displacement within the readers' minds. The main

protagonists are known only as "the man" or "the boy." This

absence of any distinguishing signifier causes an almost

everyman-effect. It brings the dysfunctional society ever

closer-to-home in that readers can more readily identify

with the unnamed hero.

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Saliba Much like anything else impractical within this

savage world, unnecessary punctuation is also discarded.

The boy loses his toys and picture books early on in the

novel, and the father too can possess nothing extraneous.

Even the old photograph of his dead wife is eventually left

behind. Although the father does take time to admire

certain objects—the sextant, for instance—he merely stares

at it reverentially, wraps it back up and puts it away. The

boy's flute, a wonderful trope for sound, beauty, and

language, also gets unremorsefully thrown away. As father

and son abandon all but the most essential (food, water,

clothing, gasoline), so too does McCarthy do away with

quotation marks and the apostrophes of most contractions.

The lack of speaker differentiation also

causes an interesting confusion in the minds of the reader.

It is very likely that McCarthy purposefully renders the

speaker unclear in order to highlight the childlike

qualities of the father and the sometimes-mature qualities

of the son:

What? he said. What is it?

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Nothing.

Tell me.

I think there's someone following us.

That's what I thought.

That's what you thought?

Yes. That's what I thought you were going to say.

What do you want to do?

I dont know. (193)

It is nearly impossible to ascertain who the elder

speaker in this passage is. It works whether the father or

the son starts the dialogue, which serves to emphasize the

very vulnerable position both are in. But their discourse

does more than obfuscate. Their minimalist mode of

conversation is also one that is comforting; it is a

catechism-like call and response that highlights the

ritualistic, soothing linguistics of parent and child.

Are we still the good guys? he said.

Yes. We're still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be.

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Okay. (77)

What's also rather interesting is McCarthy's use

of the word "okay" in their dialogue. The word occurs an

impressive 168 times and ends a total of 32 conversations.

The word itself carries different connotations. At times

it's a questing for permission, at other times it's a

pressing of will, but most often it's a pleading call for

existential reassurance—another ritualistic call and

response that serves to reassure that the two are physically

and psychically safe:

Can we wait a while?

Okay. But it's getting dark.

I know.

Okay…

There's no one here…

Okay.

Are you still scared?

Yes.

We're okay.

Okay. (204)

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Saliba The two reaffirm their status as "the good guys," the ones

who do not eat people, thus maintaining their moral

integrity—and thereby their humanity:

We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would

we?

No. Of course not.

Even if we were starving?

We're starving now.

You said we werent.

I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent

starving.

But we wouldnt

No. We wouldnt.

No matter what.

No. No matter what.

Because we're the good guys.

Yes.

And we're carrying the fire.

And we're carrying the fire. Yes.

Okay. (128-29)

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Saliba In contrast to the minimalist speech where words

like "okay" falter in their role as conveyors of complex

meanings and emotions, McCarthy creates new words in his

descriptive passages; neologisms and kennings are dotted

throughout, formed out of the need to illustrate the vast

and sullen deafening chaos that subsumes the duo. Words

like "illucid" (116), "parsible" (88), and "salitter" (261)

rise out of the ash; all sorts of kennings from "feverland"

(28) to "lampblack" (244) to "deathships" (218) abound.

This embodies the new lyricism that emerges from a

fallen and forlorn world. Much as the father uses the

fragments of the old epoch to create new tools for survival

(rags and oil become lamps, flares become weapons), new

words and meanings are also carved out of the old. "Mr.

McCarthy’s affinity for words like rachitic and crozzled has

as much visceral, atmospheric power as precise meaning. His

use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are

hellish, a hint that The Road will ultimately be more radiant

than it is punishing" (Maslin par. 11).

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Saliba This glossological innovation does not stop at the

word-level. McCarthy's prose reads like script from a

distant civilization—akin to ours, but not quite part of it:

The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven

along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and

taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday

bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the

yellow palings of their teeth. They were discalced

to a man like pilgrims of some common order for

all their shoes were long since stolen. (24)

But as verdant as McCarthy's prose is, it is all

in an ironic service of the portrayal of a world where words

die. We see this best represented in the child's own

relationship with language. In the beginning of the text,

the boy is excited about communication. The father has been

painstakingly teaching his son the alphabet and how to read.

In the beginning, the son is quite enthusiastic. The two

share lessons, conversations, memories and dreams and,

despite the suicide of the boy's mother (or perhaps because

of it), they develop a close and intimate bond; "You can

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Saliba read me a story…Cant you Papa?" the boy begs his dad (7).

Each one depends on the other for love and their close bond

enables them to grasp a fleeting semblance of normalcy

within their increasingly dark and absurd environment.

However, as time progresses, we see the boy retreat

away from speech. Whereas previously the child clamored for

his father's tales (which persistently and consistently

reaffirmed their moral status as "the good guys" who don't

cannibalize) the child ultimately rejects his father's

stories as untrue:

Do you want me to tell you a story?

No.

Why not?

Those stories are not true.

They don't have to be true. They're stories.

Yes. But in the stories we're always helping

people and we don’t help people.

Why don't you tell me a story?

I don't want to.

Okay.

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I don't have any stories to tell. (268)

It is apparent that their previous cheerful and

comforting discourse has gradually fallen into a numbness of

frozen silence. The boy retreats deeper into himself as he

distances from stories. The child also begins to refuse to

share his dreams:

I had some weird dreams.

What about?

I don't want to tell you. (252)

The paradigm shift in their relationship continues to

unfold as their weariness of the road sets in. Eventually,

the child also loses all interest in his lessons:

Can you write the alphabet?

I can write it.

We dont work on your lessons

anymore.

I know.

Can you write something in the

sand?

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Saliba

Maybe we could write a letter to

the good guys…

What if the bad guys saw it?

Yeah.

I shouldnt have said that. We could write

them a letter.

The boy shook his head. That's

okay… (245)

This important passage illustrates the death of

language as a direct consequence of the post-holocaustic

world. "We sense the despair when we learn the child knows

his alphabet, but does not work on his lessons anymore"

(Carlson 60). Here, the suggested use of language implies

hope for the future—the letter to the "good guys." But the

fear and pessimism of the reality the father offers: "What

if the bad guys see it?" supplants the idea of positive

communication and renders the usage of the written word

null.

Sometimes the boy's prolonged silences are prompted by

a traumatic event, such as when the child is attacked by the

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Saliba would-be murderer. Understandably enough, the child neither

talks nor eats for at least twenty-four hours after the

event and the father can only speak "into a blackness

without depth or dimension" (McCarthy 67).

During another horrific event of the novel, the boy

unwittingly stumbles upon the remains of a "charred human

infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit"

(198). Aghast, he plunges into his silent world once more.

Indeed, the father wonders if the child would "ever speak

again" (199). Clearly, these dreadful events cause

selective mutism in the boy, a "disorder of childhood

characterized by an inability to speak in certain settings…

[and is] associated with anxiety" (SMG par.1).

But equally traumatic to the child are the moments of

callousness or even cruelty that the father displays towards

the other travelers. Indeed, as the father's morality

corrodes, the son's despondency, and thus his distance from

language, grows. The first instance of this occurs after the

two run into a man who had been "struck by lightning." The

boy, always the one to be stricken with compassion for his

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Saliba fellow travelers, begs his father to help the stranger, but

his father refuses, claiming, "there was nothing to be done

for him" (50). This strikes the child to the core; he is

only able to "cry," "nod," and "look down." Again, for at

least an entire day, he is unable to speak—finally prompting

his father to ask him, "So when are you going to speak with

me again?" (52).

This becomes a recurring theme between the pair. As the

son falls into more lengthy periods of withdrawn silence, it

increasingly disturbs his father, who ultimately is reduced

to begging and cajoling his son back into conversation. In

fact, variations of the very phrase, "You have to talk to

me" are repeated at least ten times throughout the text .

But the father can do little to pull the boy out of his

selective mutism.

The child's disorder, however, isn't merely an

unfortunate post-traumatic by-product. Part of it is also

born from the boy's need to display his own power over his

father. As loving as the man is, he is also oftentimes

repressive and seeks to impose his will upon the child at

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Saliba every turn. He must stop and go when his father tells him;

he must enter abodes that are truly terrifying; he cannot

stay where he prefers (as by the river or in the bunker).

Some of this may turn out to be tolerable for the child, but

what clearly isn't tolerable is when the father mistreats

others. There is no clearer indication of this then when

they reach the shore and their precious cart of goods is

stolen. Driven to distraction, the father finally

apprehends the thief and humiliates the wretch by forcing

him to strip of his clothes. Throughout the ordeal, the boy

desperately tries to intervene, but when it is apparent he

can do nothing, the child simply "puts his hands over his

ears" (259), sobs and retreats into his customary

wordlessness.

But the death of language isn't only made manifest

in the boy's aversion to words. Concomitantly, other

examples of literacy and linguistics break apart. Tropes of

this phenomenological breakdown abound. Any time the duo

discover a book or a library, it is always within a context

of destruction:

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Saliba

…he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library

where blackened books lay in pools of water.

Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies

arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked

up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy

bloated pages…He let the book fall…" (187)

"The space of this written and once living memory, the

library as it appears here in its ruin, was essentially—and

the ruin itself illuminates this—a space of expectation…by

this story of the failure and fall of books and their

possibility…" (Carlson 15).

"Dying words" (McCarthy 31) become the un-mourned

victims of the apocalypse. The man finally becomes "too

tired for reading" (10). When he discovers "Soggy volumes

in a bookcase," he takes "one down and open[s] it and then

put[s] it back. Everything damp. Rotting" (130). All books

in this novel are either "swollen and shapeless" (226),

water-damaged and faded, found, glanced at and, without

exception, tossed away. They are ignored and dismissed as

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Saliba useless artifacts from a bygone era. Words have faltered and

language has failed:

the names of things slowly following those things

into oblivion. Colors, the names of birds. Things

to eat. Finally, the names of things one believed

to be true. More fragile than he would have

thought. How much was already gone? The sacred

idiom shorn of its referents and so of its

reality. (74-5)

Thomas A. Carlson, an essayist on McCarthy asks, "What

become of time and language, of life and story, in the

presence of such darkness, in the seeming collapse of the

world…What role would memory and expectation [play] in

sustaining the time and language of a world sufficiently

living to bear (or to be born by) the telling of a story?"

(55). Vereen Bell would seem to provide an answer: "The

world itself is always insisting upon its own reality; it is

then to be dealt with as itself and not as the subordinated

service of ideas" (qtd. in Brewton 127).

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The concept of God, as it exists within this novel, is

a complex and tricky one. At one end of the spectrum we

have the relentless freezing and darkening of an unobserved

and insignificant planet:

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he

saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the

world. The cold relentless circling of the

intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind

dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing

black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two

hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their

cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and

borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (McCarthy

130)

But descriptions of this sort are juxtaposed with

musings of a more theological nature. God exists in the

minds of men and it creates profound effects—especially

within the framework of language. As Carlson indicates,

"The Road engages us in a meditation—both literary and

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Saliba religious—on the essential interplay of world and heart"

(9).

McCarthy creates deeply connective tissue between

the semantics of language, the construction of character and

the concept of God. From the beginning, language and

divinity is intrinsically associated with the child; some

may even argue that this is even an intertextual reference

to Christianity. In his review, Steve Gehrke makes the

observation that "the father is partly driven by a religious

zealotry that McCarthy seems only half-invested in (151);

but it is clear that McCarthy is deeply involved in the

exploration of this theme. The child clearly evokes

religious sentiment in the mind of the father who describes

himself as appointed by God to care for the child (77). As

The Gospel of John opens with, "In the beginning was the Word.

The Word was with God and the Word was God" (John 1:1), the

father says of the boy, "If he is not the word of God, God

never spoke" (McCarthy 5). The father uses a similar

metaphor again when he claims that "on the road there are no

godspoke men" (32). Thus, in this novel, the ontological

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Saliba nature of words is indelibly welded to the notion of

divinity.

But language does reaffirm itself—in the

resurrection of thoughts, gods and speech. Directly before

and after the father's demise, we see a transformation in

the child as evidenced by the father and son's last poignant

conversation. As he lays dying, the elder again instructs

his child to talk with him; but this time, the speech is of

a different nature:

If I'm not here you can still talk to me. You can

talk to me and I'll talk to you. You'll see.

Will I hear you?

Yes. You will. You have to make it like talk that

you imagine. And you'll hear me. You have to

practice. Just don’t give up. Okay?

Okay. (279)

And so the child very lovingly and obediently, "closed his

eyes and talked to him and he kept his eyes closed and

listened. Then he tried again" (280). After his father

passes, he whispers, "I'll talk to you every day" (286).

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The boy's silent speech to his father is almost

directly identified as prayer, again solidifying the

thematic link between semantics and spirituality. When the

child is very conveniently discovered in the end (by a

nuclear family with a mother and daughter, no less), the

mother instructs the boy to pray to God. But the child

finds it easier to keep his father in mind and heart:

He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to

talk to his father and he did talk to him and he

didnt forget. The woman said that was all right.

She said that the breath of God was his breath yet

though it pass from man to man through all of

time. (286)

And so language, with its divine spark of humanity

and meaning, is ultimately "the fire" that the two have

carefully tended and carried. Throughout the narrative, the

father uses this ambiguous and undefined image to bring

meaning to the son's life. The boy often entertains self-

destructive thoughts, but it is clear that the idea of

carrying the flame brings him hope:

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You have to carry the fire.

I dont know how to.

Yes, you do.

Is it real? The fire?

Yes it is.

I dont know where it is.

Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there.

I can see it. (278-9)

The trope can also be wedded to the construct of

rhetoric and its contrapuntal, theosophic theme. This symbol

has ingrained itself so much into the child's psyche that

when he is discovered by the man "in a gray and yellow ski

parka," it is the subject of his first question:

Are you carrying the fire?

Am I what?

Carrying the fire. (283)

When his rescuer answers in the affirmative, the boy knows

that he is safe at last.

And thus, the fire of language, as embodied by the

violent beauty of McCarthy's word-craft, presents the only

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Saliba relief in this artificial, cold and unrelenting world.

Having been born in 1933, McCarthy came of age during the

twentieth century's great holocaust and many of his

formative years were spent under the dismal threat of the

nuclear bomb. It is no wonder that McCarthy chooses to work

with such themes and create a world that, though fictitious,

reflects the non-illusory teleological, if not

eschatological, folly and destructive nature of humanity.

But as bleak as a universe McCarthy has painted is, he takes

great pains to make sure it is not without hope.

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Works Cited

Brewton, Vince. "The Changing Landscape of Violence in

Cormac McCarthy's Early Novels and the Border Trilogy."

The Southern Literary Journal 37.1 (Fall 2004): 121-

143. Project MUSE. Binghamton University Library. 16

May 2009

<http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.binghamton.edu/journals/sout

hern_literary_journal/v037/37.1brewton.html>.

Carlson, Thomas A. "With the World at Heart: Reading Cormac

McCarthy's The Road

with Augustine and Heidegger." Religion and

Literature 39.3 (Autumn 2007): 47-

71. Binghamton University Blackboard. 8 May 2009.

Culver, Stuart K. "Waiting for the End of the World:

Catastrophe and the Populist Myth

of History." Configurations 3.3 (Fall 1995): 391-

413. Project MUSE. Binghamton

University Library. 9 Jun. 2009

<http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.binghamton.edu/journals/conf

igurations/v003/3.3culver.html>.

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Saliba Eaton, Mark. "Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy's

Border Fiction." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 49.1

(Spring 2003): 155-180. Project MUSE. Binghamton

University Library. 7 Jun. 2009

<http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.binghamton.edu/journals/mode

rn_fiction_studies/v049/49.1eaton.html>.

Gehrke, Steve. The Road (review). The Missouri Review 30.1

(Spring 2007): 151-152. Project MUSE. Binghamton

University Library. 9 Jun. 2009

<http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.binghamton.edu/journals/miss

ouri_review/v030/30.1gehrke.html>.

King James Bible. Biblios.com. 2004. Online Parallel Bible

Project. 13. Jun. 2009 <http://bible.cc/john/1-1.htm>.

Maslin, Janet. "The Road Through Hell, Paved With

Desperation." New York Times (25

Sept. 2006): 7 Jun. 2009

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/books/25masl.html >.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vantage International,

2006.

27

Saliba Turco, R.P., O. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack and

Carl Sagan. "Nuclear Winter:

Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear

Explosions." Science, New Series 222.4630 (Dec. 23,

1983): 1283-1292. JSTOR. Binghamton University Library.

9 Jun. 2009.

Santa Fe Institute. 7 Jun. 2009 <http://www.santafe.edu/>.

Selective Mutism Group. "What is Selective Mutism (SM?)." 9

Jun. 2009

< http://www.selectivemutism.org/faq/faqs/what-is-

selective-mutism-sm>.

Woodward, Richard B. "Cormac Country; Cormac McCarthy Would

Rather Hang Out

With Physicists." Vanity Fair. 01 Aug. 05.

Binghamton University Blackboard. 1 May 2009.

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