Apocalyptic Literature & McCarthy (The Road)

There is no doubt that McCarthy's The Road is a work of post-apocalyptic literature. From the descriptions throughout my assigned reading (1-35), the imagery that I conceived was a world that burnt down to nothing more but ashes. The first film that came to mind was Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds. This film contained some features of both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic genre because it dealt with the end of civilization due to technological singularity and showed a world after such disaster. Other films such as The Day After Tomorrow, I Am Legend, Resident Evil: After Life, and I-Robot can also be considered of (post) Apocalyptic genre.


Apocalyptic and Dystopian  literature are very similar because they are both a sub genre of science fiction. The setting in both is set in the near future. They, however, also contain differences. Apocalyptic literature concerns the end of civilization due to existential catastrophe while Dystopian literature is the idea of a society in a repressive and/or controlled state. Another way to differentiate the two is to realize that the Apocalyptic genre focuses on a larger scale such as a civilization. Dystopian genre, on the other hand, focuses on a much smaller scale such as a society.


McCarthy's writing style in The Road is very different from any other books. He, unlike other authors, lack the use of punctuations such as quotation marks when the characters are speaking. He states that he doesn't want to "blot up the page with weird little marks." I have to agree that it does make the pages in the more organized and neat, but sometimes I also have difficulty of figuring who said what. I think McCarthy wrote the book this way to emphasize on the fact that where ever they are, their surroundings are just as bleak as the pages on the book. He also uses no names no sense of time which makes me just as lost as the characters are in the novel.