BASED ON ANXIETY SENSITIVITY AND ANXIETY INHIBITION: RECONSTRUCTION OF POST APOCALYPTIC SOCIETY
Authors: Hu Die , Hu Weili , Giri Mohan 
Published: July 2022

Background

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road describes a post-apocalyptic world after a nuclear attack. The sky is gray with heavy ashes and the land is cover by burned trees and buildings. A small number of people are the only thing left alive in this world, yet most of them are members of murderous feral gangs. In the post-nuclear holocaust world, the protagonists, the father and the son, have to not only strive for food, water, medicine and shelter, but also fight against other gangsters who are desperate to hunt them for food. They are cast adrift, trying their best to survive in a world in which civilization and its concomitants have been completely destroyed. The father suffered from serious psychological trauma. He cannot sleep with the fragments of the disaster and the memory of the past immersing and lingering in his mind. How to stay safe and sound physically and psychologically, how to deal with psychological trauma, and how to reconstruct life in a waste land are the deep concerns of the writer.

Subjects and Methods

This study adopts a trauma psychology perspective to analyze Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road. The term “trauma theory” was first introduced by the American scholar, Cathy Caruth, in her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, published in 1996. She initiates the definition of trauma, advocating that “trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena”. Psychological trauma is one of the basic concepts in trauma theory, which refers to an injury left by an event or a disaster and which is difficult to heal.

Results

In a post-apocalyptic world, uncertainty and randomness dominate the daily life, and despair and void swallow people’s soul bit by bit. It is abundantly clear that survivors suffer from devastating psychological trauma. How can the humankind avoid extinction and reconstruct their life becomes an urgent problem. In this regard, McCarthy proposes several measures to reconstruct life and confront psychological trauma, namely, concerns for every human being with love and care, maintenance of fire which burns in the ardent heart with vitality and hope, and persistent and unremitting actions to fight for the bright future. He advocates love and care for the whole humankind and tries to use them as a tool to fight against the spiritual wasteland.

Conclusions

McCarthy’s The Road is devoted to a journey motivated by the father’s quest for a safer place where his young son does not have to neither wear a mask to filter the air, nor be killed and roasted for food. Although the psychological trauma is difficult to heal, it is still worth trying. The answer of how to sustain the human race and how to reconstruct life in the post-apocalyptic world lies in the inherent vitality of the ardent-hearted as well as the assertion of the claims of civilization and conscience. This paper provides a new perspective to interpret McCarthy’s The Road, demonstrating several measures to cope with psychological trauma, which bears a practical value, for people at present suffer a lot spiritually and psychologically. Yet with limited time and energy, there are few flaws in this paper. The analysis of the text of the novel is far from enough, and the interpretation of the writer’s intention is far from thorough, to name a few. The authors will continue the study of the novel with scrutiny in the future.

Acknowledgments

Supported by two projects grant from Sichuan Federation of Social Science Associations (Grant No.SC21JD016) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No.2021M691881).