One way to read this novel is as a critical commentary on the world we live in today, viewing it as on a collision course with disaster.  That is, The Road could be read as a “thought experiment” about what happens if we don’t (as humans? as Americans?) change course.  For example, it could be read as a critique of rampant materialism, or as a critique of environmental negligence, or as a critique of human aggression (expressed in individuals and nations), or as a cautionary tale about over-dependence on technology, or as a kind of allegory about moral decline (the dying of the fire).  Choose one of these angles (or one you see as also organizing the novel around a contemporary critique) and develop an argument about how it plays out in specific scenes, symbols, settings, and characters.  Connect the novel’s world explicitly to the world we actually live in through specific parallels.

One way to start is to see what McCarthy destroys, and then look for the seeds of that destruction in the contemporary world.  Another way to start is to see the novel’s blasted world as the inevitable consequence of certain ways of thinking and acting which you can identify.*

There are several study questions that might suggest ways to develop this idea.

In addition to your primary response to this discussion topic, reply substantively to someone else’s post.