Abstract

In the decimated and silent post-apocalyptic setting of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the main characters spend a significant amount of time listening to silence, listening for signs of danger, but also listening for the voice of God. Many have discussed the hopeless nihilism juxtaposed with the heavy use of Christian iconography in the novel classifying it within one of these dichotomies or somewhere on the spectrum in between. This paper argues that the hopelessness and stark silence is required to reveal hope and the opportunity to hear God's voice. To demonstrate my argument, I define the characteristics of silence, stillness, and quietness, and explain the relationship between quiet novels and what I term silent novels. I will then demonstrate how The Road exemplifies a silent novel through four principal elements: character, setting, stillness in plot, and quietist leanings through challenging binaries, of which, I will focus on three that McCarthy confronts. Through engaging sound studies theory and quietist approaches to reading, I will ultimately demonstrate that The Road, is a silent novel and that its silence is not the sound of hopeless nihilism, but the setting in which God can speak again because the characters are listening.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; English

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/