Abstract In keeping with McCarthy's other novels, The Road is littered with travel and violence. For the novel's father‐and‐son protagonists, the South is associated with warmth and food; traveling there holds the promise of redemption. In the end, however, that promise turns out to be empty. Instead, the South—a symbolic rather than geographical location—repeats the real American South and its mythologized origins in violence. Following on from this, this article argues that travel is cyclical rather than linear in the novel, where there are no beginnings or endings and movement becomes an endless inscription of the same.
Sun Yuqing (Mon,) studied this question.