Bakhtinian Ethics at the End of The Road

ABSTRACT

This article on Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road analyses the ethics of the family that adopts the boy at the end of the story. What vision of the good informs the family’s decision to reach out to help a child in a dangerous world? Drawing on the work of the Russian philosopher-critic Mikhail Bakhtin, the article shows how the family demonstrates an ethics of action, responsibility, and non-finality. Similar to Bakhtin, the family rejects the idea that dire conditions in the world might offer an alibi for moral action or close off possibilities for the emergence in the world of something new and good. In contrast to the disintegrating and paranoid ethics of the boy’s father, the family’s ethics hold out real, if precarious, hope for human life.