Standing Opposed to the Void: The Standing Metaphor in The Crossing and The Road

ABSTRACT

Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing employs and explores standing and crossing metaphors as possibilities of meaning in an implacable world. Crossing borders between wolf and human, order and disorder, and the known and the unknown, Billy Parham encounters forces that both threaten and enhance his existence. At crossings, he stands on ground at once blessed and fraughtful; he experiences opposition that imposes limits essential to his being; he stands in awe; he stands opposed to the void; and he stands witness. Over the course of the novel, the young man withstands a series of perilous crossings that profoundly test and shape his being in the world. In The Road, father and son make their way through a dying and dangerous world described in entropic terms. Acutely aware of the world’s increasing physical and moral heat loss, the father and his son travel southward along the perilous road in search of warmth. The increasingly weak father also battles the threat of nothingness. The thread of metaphorical standing in the novel investigates meaning arising through and reaching beyond the second law of thermodynamics. At its core, McCarthy’s work is epistemological, raising questions about limits and possibilities of meaning through the standing metaphor.