Strangers in the Homeland: Dystopic (in)Hospitality in McCarthy’s The Road

In a perhaps naïve but ultimately relevant question that recurs throughout McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, the boy asks for his father’s reassurance that despite the mean actions that they must undertake on the road to survival, they are still “the good guys.” As father and child roam the desolate landscape of America after an unknown cataclysmic event, they encounter a variety of potentially harmful and violent strangers on the road. Hence the need to constantly draw and redraw the lines separating themselves, the good guys, from other unknown and presumably evil strangers. Although they fear “there’s a lot of them, those bad guys” (2006, 97) neither father nor child can know what they look like, which translates into the impossibility of trusting anyone. Everyone is a stranger and a potential enemy in this landscape where the lines between civilization and savagery, citizens and strangers, have been erased. McCarthy seems to unfold the Hobbesian homo homini lupus est across the land as the State, once “the fount, the guardian and the sole guarantee of orderly life,” in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms (1997, 18), has disappeared, thus rendering a barren landscape with no law and no politics. Initially imposed by modernity, and associated to the creation of nation-States in the nineteenth century, those stable lines between inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, identity and difference have been recently questioned by Bauman, among others. For Bauman the presence of the stranger in contemporary societies has come to “befog and eclipse” those boundary lines between diametrical opposites (1997, 18). The post-apocalyptic landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road refracts this present context of globalization and the multiplication of border crossings across the globe, where the traditional spatial-temporal logic of citizens and strangers, them and us, good and evil guys, no longer captures the full complexity of the encounter.