McCarthy takes the road narrative past its nonfiction and fictional roots into speculative fiction, though based on an idea of America’s projected decline in the last half of the twentieth century.
The blackened landscape emerges as the fictional culmination of years of waste - a country that has been destroyed most likely, though never stated, by the excesses of its inhabitants and the disastrous decisions of its leaders. The Road follows an unnamed man and his son as they walk (pushing an old grocery cart full of supplies) toward the coast through an America burnt and ravaged by an unknown event. By engaging in harsh critique, the novel subverts conventions of the road narrative and, by nature of its post-apocalyptic setting, questions whether the genre has died. In fact, the novel becomes perhaps the most damning condemnation of America that issues from a road narrative. While Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006) would seem outside of this tradition (as dystopian fiction), it fits squarely within the framework of the American road narrative as cultural critique. The American road narrative, then, occupies a liminal space between disappointment and cautious hope. Even though each of these writers harshly critiques problems in the US, each also retains a measure of optimism in America’s potential to change. representative narratives like Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways all begin with idealistic visions about the country, but each document an America that, disconcertingly, gets worse. These increasingly critical visions of America occur when the reality of the country does not match any ideal visions of the country created by the travelers. They challenged the conformity that clashed with more optimistic impulses behind the journeys, such as discovering self and reveling in the freedom of the road. Yet as the century progressed, road narratives increasingly criticized problems in the country like rampant materialism and commercialization. The twentieth century American road narrative began as an idealistic enterprise that examined the possibility and hope in America.
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