"Out there the gray desolation": L'Engloutissement de l'horizon dans The Road (2006) de Cormac McCarthy

Frédérique Spill (1)

1 CORPUS - Conflits, représentations et dialogues dans l'univers anglo-saxon - UR UPJV 4295

The Road by Cormac McCarthy reads like a variation on a traditional motif in McCarthy’s work: it describes the odyssey of two characters through the American wilderness. But unlike McCarthy’s earlier novels, whose landscapes evoke magnificent frescoes, space and time in The Road turn out to be strikingly contracted and narrowed, prey to a shrinking process that contaminates the figures of speech, which are minimalist and terse. The road, which is the novel’s privileged metaphor of surviving in a derelict world, has no horizon. Thus the novel’s terrifying gloom describes a hopeless and horizon-less quest along a road that finally stumbles over nothingness.

Mots clés: objects and language; silence; McCarthy; novel; apocalypse; death; nothingness; horror; grayness; surviving; father & son; understatement; comparison; denominating

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Frédérique Spill. "Out there the gray desolation": L'Engloutissement de l'horizon dans The Road (2006) de Cormac McCarthy. Bulletin de la Société de stylistique anglaise, 2010, pp.149-161. ⟨hal-03341419⟩