Redemption In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

“There is no God and we are his prophets”:
Deconstructing Redemption in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

(paper under review: not for quotation)

Stefan Skrimshire
The University of Manchester [e-mail] 09/09/09

Abstract
Despite its overwhelmingly positive reception, the apparently redemptive conclusion to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road attracted criticism from some reviewers. They read in it an inconsistency with the nihilism that otherwise pervades the novel, as well as McCarthy’s other works. But what are they referring to when they interpret ‘redemption’, the ‘messianic’ and ‘God’ in McCarthy’s novel? Some introductory thoughts from apocalypse theory and deconstruction reveal a more nuanced approach that not
It is rather the revelation of traces, of remainders and reminders, of the God who might also be dying since he “fares no better” than men when men can’t live.45 The apocalyptic always appears with a hidden face, in the impossible or inconceivable encounter with the end of all things, of death itself. The consolation offered to the boy by his father is that he has always been “lucky”.46 Beyond irony, the word “luck” seems shorn of its associations with providence, destiny, and blessedness, and more like an unhappy covenant: an unspoken agreement that the boy is bound to continue, to keep going. The continuation of life is a brute fact for the boy as much as for Ely (neither apparently aware what keeps them going). And yet the boy is very unlike Ely, not because of his innocence, but because of his temporal language. What will happen, he asks of his father, to the other boy? To the man they abandoned? To the people imprisoned in the house? The conundrum for Ely is otherwise, and framed in the time that was. What has happened; did we see it coming? What were we thinking? Even if we did, how could we have been expected to choose? If there is redemption in The Road, perhaps all we can say of it is the ability to ask questions of the future, as opposed to only those of the past, of mourning that which
For the conclusion lies not in the messiah’s entrance, with the “real fire”, into Jerusalem, but rather, in the extension of ashen road further into what looks more like the seventh circle of hell. The final word is not the triumph of life over death, good over evil. The final word concerns the new agonal meanings of hope within the landscape of irretrievable loss. The meaning of redemption can be couched only in terms of a radical undecideability, akin to Derrida’s refusal of finality in the expression of crisis. Derrida’s concept of crisis borrows heavily from Maurice Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster. For Blanchot, death is understood as the very thing that can never be experienced or overcome. It is never cheated (through murder, or suicide) or understood.55 But disaster also represents the unease caused by the unpredictability of the event, its appearance as untimely and uninvited. Through this reinterpretation of the untimely time of ends, therefore, deconstruction invites a sort of aversion to the desire for completeness and ‘ends’ in history.

In The Road also, what is saved, redeemed, and hoped for does not echo a narrative completion or end. It is, rather, in the persistence and memory of that which refuses to be forgotten. In the end, McCarthy speaks not of the promise of new worlds, nor the redemption of human community, but of the memory