Speaking in the face of disintegration: Absurdism and the persistence of empathy in the dimming dialogues of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

In its analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, the present article aims to establish that, despite the bleakness of the deathscape portrayed, McCarthy nevertheless did not intend for violence to get the final word. Through a discussion of the dialogues of the novel, this article explores to what extent they may indeed be qualified as dialogical. Moreover, examining the instances in which language as communication becomes a problem in light of both the concerns and the mechanisms of playwrights of the absurd Beckett and Pinter, it intends to show that even though the referents of human culture appear to have vanished close to entirely from the face of The Road’s earth, sociability and empathy nonetheless manage to survive. Keywords: Cormac McCarthy; The Road; Absurdism; Samuel Beckett; Harold Pinter