The road (novel)

Die Straße (English original title: The Road ) is a novel by the American author Cormac McCarthy from 2006, the German translation by Nikolaus Stingl was published in 2007. The author won the Pulitzer Prize for novels , the James Tait Black Memorial , for the novel in 2007 Prize and the Believer Book Award . The US magazine Time listed him as the best novel of the decade and Entertainment Weekly named McCarthy's novel the best book of the past 25 years from 1983 to 2008.

content

The novel is about a father and his son who, after an unspecified catastrophe, head for the coast through post-apocalyptic America. There, they hope, their survival will be assured. The journey there takes several months under a sky darkened by ash and temperatures close to freezing. Most animals and plants are dead, father and son only meet an emaciated dog once. The few survivors of the disaster roam the country in rival groups, some of which do not shy away from cannibalism .

From the father's memories presented in the inner monologue at the beginning of the novel, the reader can infer that his wife committed suicide soon after the catastrophe, but before the onset of the outer novel . As a result, the man has made it his business to protect the son's life for the better future that the father hoped for and to lead a life of moral integrity with him even under the post-catastrophic circumstances. Father and Son refer to themselves as those who "keep the fire"; they often characterize themselves as “the good guys” as opposed to “the bad guys” who ruthlessly rob or kill other people in order to eat them. The two of them have their belongings stowed in a shopping trolley that they push along a seemingly never-ending sequence of streets. A revolver with two rounds of ammunition is the only means of the two to defend themselves in dire straits - or to commit suicide.

One day they meet a gang of heavily armed cannibals who - sitting on the back of one of the few trucks that are still ready to drive - roam the country. The son gets into the hands of one of the cannibals. The father frees the boy with a shot in the head from the revolver. They manage to escape, but have to leave the shopping cart with their last groceries behind. After a few days of walking while hungry, they find a house in the basement of which there are almost starved people who serve as "supplies" for another gang who live in the house as their headquarters. At another house they finally find a private bunker full of food, in which they only stay for a few days, taking great precautions. Before continuing on, they take a cart and load up as much food as possible.

As the walk continues, they meet an old man whom they invite to dinner, but whom they do not allow to join them.

Some time later, the father and son noticed early on that a group of hikers - three men and a pregnant woman - was catching up with them. Father and son let the four pass without being seen by them. Shortly afterwards they discover their recently abandoned campfire, above which they find the charred corpse of a newborn on a spit.

Finally, father and son reach the coast, which however does not meet their expectations and also has hardly any food or essentials for survival. Near the shore, the father discovers a shipwreck that he examines down to the last corner. He can retrieve some useful items, including canned food, a first aid kit and a flare gun . The boy developed a high fever, but survived the illness after a few days without consequences. When they don't guard their camp on the beach, a ragged man steals all the supplies. After a tough search, they find him and rob him of all his clothes and thus all chances of survival, in order to make him feel deprived. At the boy's insistence, they try unsuccessfully to give the man who has run away his clothes. Later, the father is shot with an arrow, but manages to incapacitate the attacker with the flare gun. The father treats his wound, but it becomes infected. After they have moved on, the father finds it increasingly difficult to keep walking because of his injury and his long-standing lung disease, which manifests itself in a bloody cough. Eventually the father dies one night while his son lies next to him and holds him. After three days of mourning for his father, the son meets a man who is the father of a family that, like the boy and his late father, is one of the “good guys” and renounces aggressive survival practices and cannibalism. The boy trusts him and follows him.

shape

The event is narrated by a personal narrator who reproduces the event from the perspective of either the father or the son, but without appearing as a figure of the narrative. The privilege of looking closely at father and son gives the reader access to their perceptions, feelings and hopes.

The novel uses objective and concise language to describe the post-apocalyptic world. Often the narrator dispenses with verbs and instead uses participles. This linguistically emphasizes the rigidness of this world. The literary scholar Andreas Gaile points out that McCarthy created many neologisms in the English-language original, such as “hagmoss”, “batboard” or “godspoke”. Other language creations come about through changes in the word class, such as the adjective "immolate" from the verb "to immolate" or "parsible" from "to parse".

Position in literary history

The depiction of a destroyed world with the few people remaining in it, who are fighting for their survival and have lost the usual standards of human action, identifies the novel as a representative of the genre of dystopia. More specifically, one can assign the novel to the sub-genre of a post-apocalypse literature. Well-known representatives of this sub-genre are On the Beach by Nevil Shute , Lobgesang auf Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. , Earth Abides by George R. Stewart , Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and California by Edan Lepucki.

review

The Austrian magazine profil wrote:

This radically reduced narrative, which literally encircles nothing, would have curdled into sheer action kitsch for any author of a smaller format. McCarthy has turned the story of two survivors of the Apocalypse into a grand, Old Testament-like tale.

Criticism in focus :

An extraordinarily moving, deeply moving work - sublime, majestic, of biblical force.

literature

• Cormac McCarthy: The Road . Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006. ISBN 978-0307265432 (first edition)
• Cormac McCarthy: The Street . German by Nikolaus Stingl. Rowohlt, Reinbek, 2007. ISBN 978-3-498-04507-4 (German-language first edition)

Secondary literature

• Eva Horn : The future as a catastrophe . Frankfurt a. M. 2014, pp. 157-164, 232-240.
• Sascha Löwenstein: The living self - basic features of a literary anthropology in Cormac McCarthy's The Road . In: Thomas Maier, Sascha Löwenstein (ed.): More beautiful dying. Lectures on literature at Heinrich von Veldeke Kreis . Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Berlin, 2013, pp. 26–58.
• Andreas Mauz: Along the street. About Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) . In: David Plüss et al. (Ed.): In the eye of the flaneurs. Findings on the religious art of living (= FS A. Grözinger), Zurich: TVZ 2009 (Christianity and Culture, Vol. 11), pp. 275–287.
• Alex Rühle: Surviving without having to kill: In Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road Mourns the Whole Solar System . Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 26, 2007.

filming

The book was filmed as The Road in 2009 under the direction of John Hillcoat .

In September 2009 the film premiered in competition at the 66th Venice Film Festival . Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee took on the roles of father and son . Other roles include Charlize Theron as a mother and Robert Duvall , Guy Pearce and Molly Parker . In Germany, the film opened in cinemas on October 7, 2010.

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis designed the soundtrack for the film .

Web links

• Ulrich Greiner : At the other end of the story . In: Die Zeit 14/2007
• Wieland Freund : Cormac McCarthy's hell on earth . In: Die Welt , March 19, 2007.
• Review notes on Perlentaucher.de
• Joe Penhall: Last man standing: what Cormac McCarthy made of my adaptation of The Road . In: The Guardian , January 5, 2010 (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ The New Classics: Books. The 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008. Entertainment Weekly , June 18, 2007.
2. ^ Andreas Gaile: Epilogue to The Road . In: The Road . Reclam, Stuttgart 2009. Pages 290-291.
3. ^ Andreas Gaile: Epilogue to The Road . In: The Road . Reclam, Stuttgart 2009. Pages 288-289.
4. ↑ profile No. 16 (38th year) from April 16, 2007
5. ↑ Rainer Schmitz: “What remains in the end: The American novelist Cormac McCarthy tells about the last things in Die Strasse . ". In: Focus Online , March 26, 2007
6. ↑ Content and criticism of the film adaptation of The Road ( Memento of the original from July 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at Independentfilme.com.