SMITH, CHRISTINA JEAN. What Disappears and What Remains

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soil to till or food to grow, agrarian communities cannot form. Thus the only community thatcan be sustained beyond the basic family unit is one based solely on war-mongering andcannibalism, preying on those who are weaker or smaller in number than themselves. Theirruthlessness makes them, in some respects, less vincible than the other travelers on the road;thus they are also the only beings who dare traverse the burned, ashen highways without fear- as is evidenced when (shortly after coming upon the old battlefield) the father and soncautiously observe a large band of them (with slaves in tow) marching down the road:…all wearing red scarves at their necks…an army in tennis shoes, tramping.Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Some of the pipeswere threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with everymanner of bludgeon….the phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseledwith ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings…behind themcame wagons drawn by slaves…and after that the women…some of thempregnant, and lastly a consort of catamites…yoked each to each (91-92).Like the yellowing tattooed skulls of their dead comrades, these men also bear the marks of agruesome sort of community. They wear scarves of red or orange around their necks tovisually tie themselves together. They also carry weapons that are uniform in their makeupand production; one group carries matching lead pipes (three feet in length with leatherwrappings and lanyards) while a second group carries spears and lances. On their wagonsare the goods they have plundered from other bloodcults like themselves or perhaps from oneof the "good" settlements the father alludes to but which we never see (one wonders ifperhaps they have become extinct). Their wagons are drawn by slaves and trailed by captivewomen and young boys (catamites) who are kept alive only for their use as sexual objects.Some of the women are pregnant but we suspect their infants will meet the same grim fate as37
one the father and son come across later in the novel. 19These perversions, The Road tells us,comprise the normative embodiment of "family" and fertility in this post-apocalypticwasteland; most of the women and children we see in the novel have been captured by thebloodcults and kept alive as sex slaves or, worse, harvested as sources of food. The fatherand son, in their incessant searching for the scant remains of the "dead marketplace" (cans offood), would seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Most people (we assume) longago gave in to the temptations of cannibalism or, else, were consumed by those who did.In addition to being the only group who undauntedly travel the roads and byways, thebloodcults are also the only people we see who still maintain some semblance of"domesticity" in its traditional realm - the house. In a morose inversion of family and home,it is the bloodcults alone who (in a multi-person community that mimics, on some level, afamily) live in the one occupied house we see in The Road. The house is a great, dilapidatedstructure and the setting for what is, arguably, the most disturbing scene in the novel. Fromthe descriptions McCarthy gives it easy to guess that this house is an old plantation home, "aonce grand house…with white Doric columns across the front" whose windows are "oddlyintact" (105). Previous descriptors in this section hint that the duo are traveling through oneof the Southern states, and as they ascend the front steps and cross the great porch, the fatherobserves that "chattel slaves had once trod those boards bearing food and drink on silvertrays" (105). The layered significance of this particular location (one that formerly housedslaves) is made more obvious when the father discovers a padlocked hatch in the floor of a19 At one point, they see three men and a pregnant woman walking down the road - "all of them wretched looking beyonddescription". Later, they catch up to where these same travelers have made and fled camp, only to discover a "charredhuman infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit" (195, 198).38
Page 1 and 2: ABSTRACTSMITH, CHRISTINA JEAN. What
Page 3 and 4: DedicationTo my mom and sister who
Page 5 and 6: Table of ContentsIntroduction……
Page 7 and 8: Ten years later, however - this gap
Page 9 and 10: the other side of such a scenario)
Page 11 and 12: and ask "What now?". And the logica
Page 13 and 14: dizzying, deconstructing effects of
Page 15 and 16: civilization - and is told mainly f
Page 17 and 18: humanity is only capable of a brief
Page 19 and 20: primitivism (lack of or rudimentary
Page 21 and 22: desert on a Lenten vigil. He must s
Page 23 and 24: weapons (since space compresses alo
Page 25 and 26: more importantly, he is the first p
Page 27 and 28: A second way in which Miller uses t
Page 29 and 30: able to recognize the lamp's dark p
Page 31 and 32: Chapter TwoA Flame in the Darkness:
Page 33 and 34: The novel's ending suggests, at bes
Page 35 and 36: een considered off-limits as a sour
Page 37 and 38: overarching human continuum and rai
Page 39 and 40: the detritus and scant remaining go
Page 41: of men tottering down the causeway"
Page 45 and 46: while the father and son spend most
Page 47 and 48: Dear people, thank you for all this
Page 49 and 50: family have been fulfilled by this
Page 51 and 52: vision of transition as it applies
Page 53 and 54: "different"; she keeps a close hold
Page 55 and 56: (gather) books as well as wood to b
Page 57 and 58: have settled since any semi-safe mo
Page 59 and 60: ConclusionThe post-apocalyptic narr
Page 61 and 62: leaves us room to hope that the fut
Page 63: Patrides, C.A. and Joseph Wittrech,

SMITH, CHRISTINA JEAN. What Disappears and What Remains

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