SMITH, CHRISTINA JEAN. What Disappears and What Remains

The parent-child relationship is central to the novel itself, which is set some eight toten years 14 after a nuclear war or asteroidal collision has destroyed and burned much of thelandscape, immolated vast numbers of people and created a sort of nuclear winter, whichthreatens what few survivors remain. It is bitterly cold and ash falls day and night, obscuringthe sun which "circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp" (32). Because the suncan only partially penetrate the ashen atmosphere, trees, plants and animals have withered ordied, and the humans (unable to band together even in some dystopian agrarian community)are left with a dead landscape and what remnants of preserved foodstuffs or usable trashremain from the old society. The father and son search for clean water, stray cans of peachesor Kool-Aid packets while "the bloodcults", warring bands of savage cannibals, search forhuman prey. In the midst of this perilous endgame, McCarthy puts on center stage theintimate relationship between a father and his son who are traveling southward on a desertedhighway in the hopes of finding a warmer climate and, perhaps, other remnants ofcivilization.And, it is in the rhythms of this relationship - as well as the ways in which it contrastswith the blighted landscape around it - that McCarthy lays out his vision for the possibility of"society" in the post-apocalypse. He sees a world in which large-scale organized society hasfallen under the weight of its own precariously complicated systems and in which the onlyorganized societies are pockets of barbaric men that prey upon the weak. In the middle ofthis, the father and son form a society unto themselves - one that operates within the rottingcorpse of the old as they roam the barren hills and valleys of the "intestate earth" (130).14 We can guess this based on McCarthy's descriptions of the boy - who seems to be between seven and ten years old andwas born on the night of the cataclismic explosion or collision.27