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Placing Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road, in geographical and chronological perspectives are among the first challenges to an inquisitive reader of the book. This paper will address the geographical question by attempting to trace the route followed by the father and son.
Among other attributes, Cormac McCarthy is known and admired for his careful research and close attention to the details of physical settings in his novels. Those readers familiar with the general terrain described in a McCarthy novel can usually identify multiple specific locations in each of his earlier books (with the possible exception of Outer Dark). One might expect that this generalization would hold true for The Road as well.
However, reviews by a number of apparently geographically challenged critics and commentators have suggested some novel (no pun intended) locations for the route. Mike Shea in the Texas Monthly said that "the man and the boy could be anywhere", but that the "See Rock City" sign "suggests Georgia" (Shea 60). Jerome Weeks of The Dallas Morning News placed the pair "in a barren Southwest" where "[t]hey seem to be headed for the coast of California." William Kennedy in The New York Times maintains the pair "are heading to the Gulf Coast" (Kennedy 10).
I first presented my ideas about the route of The Road on the Cormac McCarthy Forum in a thread titled, "First Look at The Road," on June 28, 2006. The ideas presented there are elaborated in this paper.
The location of the beginning and end of the trip are unclear to me, but I believe the trail can be picked up fairly early in the novel in Middlesboro, Kentucky: "A raw hill country. Aluminum houses" (TR 12). In Middlesboro, along the route of the old Wilderness Road (US 25-E) and the old Dixie Highway, there are a large number of mobile homes, euphemistically called "aluminum houses," just north of the Cumberland Gap tunnel. It seems safe to assume that the father and son pass through Middlesboro, Kentucky on their way over Cumberland Gap.
Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of...