Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthy's the Road

SINCE World War II, American literature has repeatedly questioned the existence of social and religious meaning in a society capable of destroying itself. In Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling, suffering from existential malaise, writes in his notebook, "Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference" (119). Oedipa Maas, in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, seeks the meaning of symbols she begins to think are only "some kind of compensation" for "having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night" (118). Ruth Foster, in Marilynne Robinson's powerful novel Housekeeping, comes to realize "that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words." In White Noise, Don DeLillo's character Jack Gladney encounters nuns who pretend to believe in heaven. "If we did not pretend to believe these things," one of them tells Gladney, "the world would collapse" (318).