‘Whatever form you spoke of you were right’: Multivalence and ambiguous address in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract

This article explores the workings of second-person pronoun forms in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road. More particularly, the analysis focuses on examples of ‘doubly deictic you’ (Herman, 2002), and demonstrates how the novel exploits the uncertain deictic, referential and address functions of this particular pronoun form to develop what I term a ‘post-apocalyptic poetics’, through which it attempts to explore – and enact – the spatial and temporal dislocations that ensue from the fictional apocalypse. The article also demonstrates how the novel’s indeterminate use of narrative you creates profound hermeneutical (and often ontological) uncertainty for readers, who must often suspend any attempt to fix the positions from and to which the story is addressed. McCarthy’s opaque use of the terms you and your throughout the novel creates profound polyphony and multivalence by preventing readers from clearly distinguishing the discourse and perspectives of protagonists from those of the narration, and by thus impelling readers to develop several interpretations of key passages, all of which must be sustained simultaneously. Finally, the analysis explores how the (potential) apostrophic effects associated with doubly deictic you serve to immerse readers in the horrors of the post-apocalyptic world, thus increasing the novel’s ecocritical import.