“The World He'd Lost”: Geography and “Green” Memory in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

ABSTRACT In Cormac McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road, a father and his son travel the blasted, ruined landscape of a postapocalyptic America. The father remembers the logic, beauty, and order of America's old topography, but he must now confront a new landscape where old signs mean nothing, where old signals are removed of meaning, and where formerly safe, understood, and beautiful places are instead sites of sheer horror. The son, in contrast, born after the event that caused the ruin, knows nothing of the former world and relies only on his father's stories and memories of that world's landscapes. As the pair moves across the barren spaces of this “new” America, these memories create (for the father, the son, and for the reader) both a decipherable and an unknowable terrain simultaneously. My essay focuses on this composite geography within McCarthy's novel, examining the ways in which the world's geographical and emotional meaning has been broken in the text. Disaster and ruin have scraped the landscape of The Road nearly bare of any former codes or meanings, and the old geography is written over with a new and horrific “narrative.” In this alien world, the father's geographical memories are like those faint lines of text in a palimpsest that show through beneath the newer inscriptions. McCarthy carefully and deliberately inserts the father's place-memories throughout the narrative, and it is these memories—in combination with McCarthy's own culturally weighted landscape details—that help create a layered and complex geography out of postapocalyptic nothingness.