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Introduction
In 2006, Cormac McCarthy published two new works, The Sunset Limited and The Road. At first glance the two could not appear to be more different. The Sunset Limited (subtitled "A Novel in Dramatic Form," and originally produced as a play) forms a long one-act dialogue between a suicidal university professor and the religiously minded ex-convict who has just prevented him from jumping in front of a train. Their encounter, as the spare narrative prologue relates, is set inside the ex-con's apartment "in a tenement building in a black ghetto in New York City" (3). The Road, on the other hand, eschews all such claims to contemporaneous realism of setting. Rather, in a series of broken sentences and broken paragraphs, the novel narrates the months-long peripatetic journey south of a father and son in a harrowing post-apocalyptic American wasteland. As far as settings go, then, The Sunset Limited and The Road present incompossible fictional worlds. Closer inspection of the two, however, yields a payload of unobtrusive correspondences- syntactical similarities, phrasal repetitions, common rhetorical figures, convergent thematic concerns.
Such correspondences, as I will argue, point to the common origin of these works in a rigorously developed, yet discretely diffuse allegorical outlook. The relative inconspicuousness of the allegorical element in McCarthy's style is at least in part the obverse of the ostentatiousness of its mimetic complement. One could say that on the surface, the mimetic principle takes pride of place, but the infrastructure is all allegory . . . in much the same way that the bark of a certain graveyard elm conceals the wrought iron wire "[g]rowed all up" inside of it (OK 3). Indeed this inaugural image of The Orchard Keeper, in which the natural and the artificial are revealed as inextricably entangled, ably announces the aesthetic difference at the origin of McCarthy's art. Realistic yet symbolic (Jarrett), mimetic yet allegorical (Cant), this productive dichotomy accounts for both the descriptive power and the philosophical largesse of McCarthy's works. What follows is an exploration of two of the most prominent features of McCarthy's allegorism on display in The Sunset Limited and The Road-the ritualism of narrative structure, and the daemonism of narrative agency. The formal analysis of these features then modulates into a genealogical account...