After Apocalyptic Closure, a New Beginning: The Poetics of Worldly Dis-Appearance in Cormac McCarthy’s <i>The Road</i> as Heideggerian Religious Allegory

ABSTRACT This article argues for a new reading of The Road in terms of a Heideggerian religiosity that suggests that reality can still be reenchanted with traces of the divine after the demise of ontotheological belief. In locating an intertextual resonance between McCarthy’s reference to the “last god” in the novel and Heidegger’s late philosophy, this article argues that both novelist and philosopher advocate for a new consideration of the holy as pietistic dwelling within the openness of the world, which itself manifests as nonmetaphysical event of opening. Heidegger’s approach becomes useful in allowing us to understand McCarthy’s insistence in The Road on presenting the starkness of an absent world as a vortex of nothingness that paradoxically constitutes the very parameters for beings in the world to step forth from hiddenness into presence. In reading the novel as an allegory of the death and rebirth of a (non)metaphysical worldview, this article emphasizes the philosophical significance of McCarthy’s post-theological poetics of divinity as moving the sense of the world from metaphysical construct toward the proximate presence of a sacralized notion of reality that allows beings to emerge and stand forth in their truth.