Mahsa Hashemi

Heart-wrenching, unsettling and dark, Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road (2006), is a story that starts at the end of the world, civilization, humanity and life. The unnamed protagonists embark upon an arduous journey through a barren, death-stricken landscape in a post-apocalyptic setting marked by ashes, blood and cannibals, striving to survive. The wasteland where the story takes place and the road across which the father and the son move is a disfigured landscape where the borders between cities and states are only lines on a worn-out map, where concepts, ideas, entities and values also have lost their defining borders and what is left is a porous space, an indeterminate interface of all dualities which necessitate a synthetic mindset for the protagonists in order to survive. Benefitting from the theories in Borderland studies, especially those propounded by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, this study intends to illustrate how Cormac McCarthy converts a traditional wasteland setting after a worldwide disaster into a rife psychological borderland of mind. It is suggested that the physical setting in the novel has metamorphosed into a psychological state of mind where the characters gradually develop a borderland mentality that serves a pivotal function in their strategies of survival as their archetypal journey is mapped out.