I have avoided reading McCarthy’s The Road since it came out in college predominately because, after reading All The Pretty Horses, I didn’t think I needed that kind of bleak post apocalypse in my mind. You remember what you want to forget and forget what you want to remember, after all. And frankly, knowing what I know about Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men and having read enough of Lonesome Dove, I didn’t really expect it to end happy. This compounded with the father son story in the year my father died and other things happened, I… well let’s just say I also owe y’all a long, reflective Brothers Karamazov piece. I expected various version of sad, depressing, bleakness with which The Road could end. I’m happy I was wrong on that count: that, for a McCarthy novel with the premise of a father with either lung cancer or tuberculosis leading his son through an apocalyptic hell, it had about as happy of an ending as conceivably possible. One parallel to Dante’s Inferno.

So I was predominately wrong because it’s not a post apocalypse. At least not any more than Revelation and Dante’s Inferno are. Granted, those are αποκαλυψεις in the truest sense: they throw the cover off of their societies and lay bear the formal, final, and ontological realities underpinning what was thought to be important in the empires and individuals of the time. Especially of the individuals: whatever Dante’s Inferno is, it’s first and foremost Dante’s extremely personal spiritual biography as he processes his love for Beatrice and purges that relationship of every earthly coil he could conceive of at the time, with all of its historical and cultural and addictive and political and economic injustices. In some ways, the book of Revelation works similarly for the exile John, though that one does take on more of a foretelling than forthtelling tone. 

I won’t belabor the point with 3 Enoch and the Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah and the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter. 

In any case, yes: my friend Kyle Welch was right to say that most post apocalyptic stories in the modern era have McCarthy towering over them in a similar way to Tolkien and high fantasy. But as Tolkien was more interested in creating a sort of experience that only folks who have dealt with manuscript histories can properly appreciate, McCarthy didn’t have his eye on writing the next Mad Max. In this way, the genre of post apocalypse functions as a small subset of broader apocalyptic works: those that carry a heavy speculative element befitting most Scifi literature in a “if this carries on unchanged, the consequences will be…” sort of way. 

Rather, it’s quite clear to me that McCarthy is writing a very, very clear response and recontextualization of Inferno. We know that four of his manuscripts were written concurrently (as is the case with most writers I know), so it’s likely that No Country, Passengers, and Stellar Maris were all being written at the same time. All four of those in the mid-naughties unless there are still unfinished manuscripts yet to see the light of day — it seems McCarthy negotiated the terms of the release of his papers, but even that seems to imply an inherent captivity every journal suffers under its creator. It’s clear that the mid-aughties novel bears a remarkable oppression in the back of his mind — all our minds — in the wake of 9/11 and (for those truly paying attention to the content of Al Gore’s message at the time, rather than the delivery or the reception) climate change. However, in public statements the novel seems to have been something that came to a father escorting his young son through El Paso. Fires on the hills. What it would take to survive in a city like that, burning. McCarthy talked to his brother about various scenarios for an apocalypse in a Wall Street Journal interview and talked of how folks return to cannibalism: “when everything’s gone, the only thing left to eat is each other.”

Setting up the main contrast of the bad guys who do so and the good guys who carry the fire. Those who burn without and those who burn within, those tortured and killed by fire and those baptized by fire. 

Leading us back to Inferno. Yes, the novel critiques American exceptionalism. And yes, it is absolutely speculative fiction — science fiction of the subgenera of apocalypse. But it’s not a post-apocalyptic novel that focuses on the cause of the post-apocalypse. Or even, necessarily, the broad sociological consequences. You get the idea that cannibals roam the place. That they have armies. That they have communes. But you really don’t know where the good guys are, mainly because the father’s too scared to join them. You know people like this: their survivalism and their lack of trust in humanity go hand in hand. The very thing that motivates them to survive and become self-sufficient is the thing holding them back from true human flourishing. 

That’s not to say the main character should have shacked up with the cannibals so much as he encounters many, many more of the good guys along the way than he’d like to admit. The boy makes this rather clear. All of this to say the novel is extremely intimate and doesn’t focus at all on the broad sociological, militaristic, political, scientific consequences of the apocalypse. So it’s not very modern at all on that front. 

It’s like Dante. And he tees up this comparison at the very start:

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him” 

Compared with:

—I came
to myself within a dark wood where the straight
way was lost.

Dante’s Inferno, Canto 1

The texts share their everyman protagonist (never named, even when his boy shouts it), a psychopomp, the barren waste of fire, sin, suffering, God, and the pursuit of wisdom coupled with the allegory of The Way. Emily Lane of the University of New Orleans seems to think McCarthy exploits and subverts the pathetic fallacy in order to show how our Earth holds no sympathy for us.