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Ideological Fantasy and the Real in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road - A Zizekian Approach -

  • Journal of Humanities
  • 2016, (61), pp.223-257
  • Publisher : Institute for Humanities
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : April 6, 2016
  • Accepted : May 3, 2016

SANGYOUN AN 1

1성균관대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is frequently associated with the tradition of post-apocalyptic novel as well as the sense of the ending in the aftermath of the world’s collapse. Most scholars regard the barren and devastated space represented in The Road as a geographical as well as physical one destructed by natural disasters or any tangible attack such as a nuclear war or an alien invasion. From the contemporary point of view, however, where the boundaries between reality and the Real become blurred, the space of The Road is the space of the Real, void of symbolic order and ideological fantasy. With regard to the protagonists, an unnamed man and his son traveling in the disparate world - in Zizekian terms “the desert of the Real” - The Road fits best in the genre of journey literature. Along the journey of the road, they begin to fight for survival and learn how to survive in order to enter the symbolic and to escape from the Real. The father, unlike other survivors in the road, begins to function as a Lacanian “(Name of the) Father” to his son. After the suicide of his wife, feeling keenly the necessity of the ideological fantasy, he tries to inculcate the ideological fantasy and symbolic order such as “carrying the fire” and the ethics of “a good guy” in his son’s mind. According to his Father’s words, the boy tries to “carry the fire” and to be “a good guy”. At the end of the novel, after his father’s death, the boy finally becomes a member of the family who he thinks carries the fire and continues his journey in search of hope. Becoming a new family member symbolizes that the boy becomes a symbolic subject who keeps the ideological fantasy and adds absolute value to his Father’s words, which control the boy’s unconsciousness. This fact can be explained in the Lacanian “alienation” which the symbolic subjects are to undergo in order to enter the symbolic, since the birth of a symbolic subject dominated by the Father’s words and ideological fantasy is accompanied by the death of a “being”. Consequently, the symbolization of “maps and maze” presented in the last page secretly reveals the truth of the Real hidden behind the ideological fantasy.

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