The unbearable trauma of being : death, hope, and (in)humanity in the work of Cormac McCarthy

Abstract

For as long as the self-christened homo sapiens has roamed the Earth, various mythologies and their respective afterlives have followed without fail. Through the work of Cormac McCarthy, this paper seeks to explore the connections (if any) between mortality, hope, and the intrinsically human need for narratives of the afterlife. The term “after(-)life” is understood to denote not simply the realm that supposedly awaits us after physical death; throughout this paper, the after-life is also investigated as that mode of being which occurs follow a point of trauma, be it physical, mental, spiritual, or epistemological in nature. Three of McCarthy’s most pivotal novels (The Road, Child of God, and Blood Meridian) will be discussed in relation to the question of trauma, hope, and inhumanity, and what it means to be after the human experiences a distinct collapse in meaning. Finally, this paper endeavours to discuss such questions as “why this human need for hope?”, “how does hope persist in the face of inhumanity?”, and “is it this resilience that makes us human?”