Post- Apocalypse

The Road's Post-Apocalyptic setting is typical of many others post- apocalypse novels.

Protected bastions of humanity in a sea of inhospitable waste or wilderness or danger, such as enclosed cities, underground caverns, and bunkers	The man and boy find themselves alone in the wildness constantly hiding from the dangers presented by other humans. The cities are said to have been taken over by scavengers and too dangerous to venture into yet there are bunkers (p. 146) preserved that suggests that people were preparing for this eventuality even if many have not survived.
Marauding gangs of bandits	P. 96 ‘An army in tennis shoes’ force the man and boy into hiding where they notice the weapons, ‘three foot lengths of pipe with leather wrapping’ and the slaves, ‘slaves in harnesses and piled with goods… women’ and a ‘consort of catamites.’ The boy asks if they are the ‘bad guys’ and the man confirms it.
‘Apocalypse’ derives from the Greek word for ‘revelation’	The characters go through many revelations in the book however for the reader very little is revealed. For the man he realises to let go of the past when he is forced to leave the pictures of his wife on the road, he also realizes that he needs to distance himself from the boy. The boy is a revelation in himself as he refers to himself as ‘the one’ which suggests a saviour like role which creates a sense of hope, he also brings a moral message as he tries to help all of the travellers they see.
Fall of civilization	Through the man’s flashbacks there is a sense of a civilisation and of a world before the one the book is set in. This suggests that in some way that civilisation has fallen and has been replaced with this new world. The man hears ‘low concussions in the distance’ and when the woman gives birth to the boy the ‘cities burn.’
Mythologizing of the past	The past is rarely mentioned in this novel that focuses on minute by minute survival. The few mentions of the past are done so through the man’s eyes with flashbacks and memories as well as his actions. In some ways the past is mythicized by this vagueness however to the man it is still alive and part of him, shown when he rings his father’s number even though the phone wouldn’t work. To the boy there is no past as all he has ever known is this world and any stories from before would all be legends to him.
The thoughts and actions of the survivors are what counts	Here the actions and thoughts of the man and the boy are the main drive of the story. However the thoughts and actions of the other characters are also relevant. The man splits the survivors into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys.’ The ‘bad guys’ are the ones who created tension through their actions causing conflict. Eli is the only name in the book and his thoughts emphasis the hardship the man goes through with the boy. The boy’s thoughts and actions are unique because he is very humanitarian whereas the man is more conservative.
Humanity has always imagined its own destruction. Each generation believes the end is somewhere round the corner, and our catastrophic fantasies are a good barometer of what’s currently troubling us	There is no confirmation of how the world was destroy however it can be interpreted as a manmade apocalypse. The low concussions could suggest bombs. However the bunker is specifically related to this point as it shows that people were prepared for the end of the world. McCarthy may have taken inspiration from the nuclear scares of the Cold War specifically in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Post-apocalyptic novels are a dark, bleak and often illuminating genre	McCarthy’s simplistic writing style depicts a world drained of colour, with only the mention of ‘gunmetal silver’ ‘grey’ and ‘black’. There appears little hope for the characters who are surviving for the sake of survival and there appears to be no good outcome. It is also illuminating in the way it shows the new societies that have formed in place of the old one. Most of the people the man and boy encounter come under the name ‘bad guys’ that makes the reader question human questions and the fragility of morals especially as it is only the boy, who hasn’t known the world before, who still has moral ambiguities to help other.
Punishment for our wicked overreaching	McCarthy has made many references to American Low culture, such as movies and Cola. The cola and the shopping cart that reflects ‘Dawn of the Living Dead’ suggest society’s obsession with consumer goods and brands. The idea that people over shop and over reach is overturned in the novel because the man and boy constantly have to eat as much as they can because there is no room to take it with them only for them to run out.
A chaotic dark age, in which robber bands, bizarre millenarian religious sects, nomads, hunters and foragers of all sorts are found.	The man and boy encounter a lot of different characters, from fellow travellers to cannibals, victims and militia-like groups. Each one presents a different sort of threat to the man and boy. While the boy wants to help the fellow travellers the man is conscious of their supplies but doesn’t want to upset the boy while the cannibals and armed gangs pose a more physical threat.
The remains of the industrial society – its rotting industrial plants, its collapsed cities – litter the landscape, archaeology rather than evidence of recent catastrophe.	While the novel doesn’t explore industrial society as much except to mention the abandoned cities where scavengers and thieves live. The houses that they visit are in very bad disrepair, mostly raided and broken down for firewood and other survival essentials.