The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel. It follows the journey of a father and son who travel along a road in hopes to find a safer place and escape from an area of scarcity and cannibals. McCarthy never says what causes this apocalypse, what causes the world to lead people to be so desperate for survival they have to eat other humans, but many theories on what could have caused it have been presented.
Upon my first time reading it, I fell more towards the idea of a supernatural zombie apocalypse. Or maybe I just wished so, to make my English lessons more exciting. The zombie apocalypse trope emerged with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968, about a human-resembling monster raised from the dead, cursed with a thirst to infect other humans. A quote that I thought related to The Road the most was ‘when things look desperate in the world, the dead get up and walk’. The cannibals could just be desperate humans, but because of the sheer amount of cannibalism the book describes, it can be assumed that a wider spread mass of zombies is applicable. Greg Garett highlights this, explaining how there is no ‘leaking chemicals or radioactive satellites’ but on the other hand cannibalism ‘informs the major conflicts of the book’.
Other theories focus on the issue that the problem is man-made, to fit in with the theme of contemplation on human nature and compassion. A catastrophe. Ozden Sozalan argues that The Road is a ‘9/11 novel that is pretending not to be a 9/11 novel’. The American Dream turning into the American nightmare. The Road being published in 2006 could be analysed as a reflection on 9/11. Of the power humans have to cause death and destruction.
Man-made catastrophes could also be in the form of a nuclear war. What indicates this is that ‘everything is covered in ash’. There’s constant imagery of ‘ashen scabland’ or the ‘ashes of the late world’. This could be a sign of a nuclear winter. A nuclear war wouldn’t wipe out all life on earth. Instead it would leave some human life to struggle, allowing the father and his son to still be alive in an almost dead world. However, this theory doesn’t match with other descriptions that occur in the book. For example, a nuclear war would not cause the ongoing earthquakes that are going on. Furthermore, a nuclear war would cause radiation that the father and son would be aware of and suffering from. But there is no sign of this.
Some might consider climate change to be mainly a man-made problem. Jared Diamond says that the worst climate change can cause is a ‘doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization’. This is apparent in The Road, where the landscape only has scraps of the industrial world still existing like a worn down billboard or a single bottle of Coca-Cola. 2007 was actually the year that the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) were confident that humans were changing the climate, making it more believable that McCarthy would be influenced by more recent awareness around climate.
Another possible natural disaster is a volcano, or more specifically, a supervolcano. A supervolcano eruption would have a catastrophic effect on the world, but wouldn’t kill everyone. It could also explain the fire, ash, charred landscape and dark grey clouds. The novel describes a possible moment the apocalypse started, where “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? She said. He didn’t answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was gone.” The bright light could be the explosion of this supervolcano. But, if he was close enough to see the light, he would be dead within minutes.
What else could this bright light be? A popular theory is a meteor or asteroid attack. The widespread devastation easily mirrors the ones the dinosaurs faced, as the Planetary Scientific institute found that 75% of animals and plants went extinct after the Ucatan meteor. It would also explain the ash without the radiation that nuclear war would cause, and a meteor strike could cause a series of volcanic eruptions to explain the fires that in a thermal wave could spread to forests and buildings. The impact of a meteor hitting the earth could also explain the electricity stopping. Although this would make the father and son uncannily lucky, it is possible they were far enough from the asteroid to not die but still have their surroundings destroyed.
McCarthy didn’t write The Road with a specific event in mind that might cause this destruction, claiming ‘I don’t have an opinion. It could be anything – volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important’ in an interview. Yet he did meet with expert Doug Erwin and asked him about what a meteor would cause, and Erwin explained how the aftermaths would cause desolation, collapse of ecosystems and debris. A year later, The Road was published.
