University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
"The way of the world is to bloom and flower and die": the palindrome of knowing in Cormac McCarthy's The Road
Abstract
dc:description.abstractMeaning has been the topic of much commentary on Cormac McCarthy’s work. Critics posit an array of conclusions about meaning in his corpus, ranging from its impossibility to its excess. Much work concludes that if meaning exists, it is generated from an interplay between the natural world that McCarthy describes in his work and the characters who interact with it. With The Road, McCarthy offers his clearest presentation of meaning as it pertains to human knowing. In this presentation, McCarthy explores knowing through a beginning-in-ending, or palindromatic scheme; he arrives at the origins of knowing by reaching its terminus mirror. The scheme of The Road involves the idea of negative knowledge, which involves the process of unknowing former realities. This process is outworked by the novel’s father, who must unlearn the functionality of a social object-world that had been decimated by an apocalyptic event. McCarthy shows the father and his son entering dwellings and using the objects they find in them to depict this negative knowing, as he employs the literal road as a conduit of knowing; it is the channel that brings the two into contact with knowable things. By the novel’s end, the father’s mode of knowing loses its functionality, which is symbolized by the road’s failure to bring the two into contact with dwellings. Through this, McCarthy indicates that human knowing and meaning has been refigured, its new form embodied in the son.
Degree
thesis:*- Grantor dc:publisher
- University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
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- Clark, Joseph
- Contributors dc:contributor
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- O'Dea, Gregory
- Wilferth, Joe; Guy, Matthew
- College of Arts and Sciences
Subjects
dc:subject × 6Rights
dc:rights- Language dc:language
- English, eng
Identifiers
dc:identifier.*- Repository record dc:identifier
- https://scholar.utc.edu/theses/35
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:scholar.utc.edu:theses-1034