Anarchetypal Journeys in Post-apocalyptic Narratives. The Implacable Darkness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Cormac McCarthy is well-known within the literary world for his rather bleak writing, and The Road (2006) is without doubt one of the novels that exemplifies this characteristic the most. In an attempt to join the already extensive critical literature on McCarthy from an original perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine The Road by combining the analysis of the post-apocalyptic narrative’s elements with a focus on the characters’ journey itself. To this end, my approach would bring into discussion Corin Braga’s concept of the “anarchetype”, the opposite term for the archetype understood in a cultural sense, namely as a recurring model or an artistic constant. I argue that this concept, representative for the vision of the decentred postmodern subject, structures McCarthy’s novel through the way in which it builds the plot out of episodes that succeed one another in an unpredictable way.