SMITH, CHRISTINA JEAN. What Disappears and What Remains

keep a foot in each of the two worlds - that of the mass-produced and that of the natural.Both worlds, McCarthy shows us, are dead or dying: the trash-strewn, water logged grocerystores represent a type of death as real as the barren tracts of land over which the two travel.The world of the man-made and the world of the natural - each have shriveled and dried up inthe post-apocalyptic realm of The Road, and the only society that can still exist is one thatlearns to effectively exploit the tiny remnants of life, of sustenance, that might still exist inthese spheres.The Barbaric Societies: the BloodcultsWhile the society of two makes its way quietly through the countryside - an amorphous unitthat ingests the decaying elements of man-made society and takes refuge in the forests andhills of the dying natural world - they must be wary of contact with the bloodcults who formthe only fixed, multi-person society we see in The Road. The bloodcults are made up ofbarbaric men who will rape, kill, eat or enslave any travelers they find and who war with oneanother for power. The father and son's interactions with them are mercifully limited (thefather is forced to shoot one of them when the barbarian stumbles into the woods to relievehimself and attempts to capture the boy at knifepoint). Other than their brief contact with the"rachitic" man whose "colliculus and temporal gyrus" are turned "to soup" by the father'sbullet -- the man and the boy have only indirect contact with the cults themselves (63,64).What indirect contact they do have, however, sheds much light on the way in whichsociety, in McCarthy's vision, has regrouped itself post-disaster. McCarthy lets us know thatin the first years after the apocalypse the "roads were peopled with refugees…creedless shells35