The Liminal Space: Unravelling Borderland Mentality in Cormac McCarthy’s <i>The Road</i>

Abstract Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is a harrowing story about life, death, and humanity. The narrative features protagonists striving to survive in a death-stricken landscape as they embark on an uncertain journey southward. The wasteland in which the story unfolds, and the road along which the father and the son traverse, form an inhospitable, disfigured world where the borders between cities are lines on a worn-out map and core values have lost their defining edges. The road stands as an indeterminate interface of dualities. The present study aims to uncover how the physical, post-apocalyptic setting functions as a liminal space, compelling the characters to develop a synthetic ‘borderland mentality’ while they grapple with the existential and moral challenges of survival as their archetypal journey is mapped out. Drawing on the major tenets of borderland studies and the concept of liminality, this essay examines how the protagonists need to adopt borderland mentality to deal with the landscape’s indeterminacies and binaries. It is suggested that despite its appalling imagery, The Road offers the possibility of survival amidst the dreariest conditions through resilience and developing a borderland mentality.