Michael Sauter, M.A. (University of Augsburg, Germany)
Painful Reading: The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy
This paper offers a reading of The Road as a narrative of and about trauma and proposes to see it in that function as an organical extension of McCarthy’s earlier works. In a preliminary survey Blood Meridian (1985), once described as the “bloodiest book since The Iliad” and All the Pretty Horses (1992) will serve to illustrate McCarthy’s central themes and will be discussed as explorations of cultural trauma. The main part of the talk will focus on McCarthy’s most recent novel The Road (2006), which marked a departure for the author: its outlook seems slightly more positive than has been the norm, and, maybe as a consequence, the novel has met with unprecedented commercial success. In this post-apocalyptic tale of a son and father struggling for survival trauma is omnipresent. It will be shown in how far this fictional account displays continuities with McCarthy’s earlier works and special emphasis will be put on the ethical questions the text asks, as well as the portrayal of trauma and forms of coping behavior. The novel is read as a meditation on how to ethically deal with other people’s pain – when nothing else of substance seems to exist in the world.
Michael Sauter, M.A.is a lecturer at the University of Augsburg and coordinator of the honors graduate program ,Ethics of Textual Cultures‘. His research interests include ethical criticism and ecocriticism. He is currently working on his dissertation Ethical Perspectives on the Novels of Philip Roth.
