Uncanny Revelation in Cormac McCarthy’s <i>The Road</i>

ABSTRACT Cormac McCarthy’s The Road offers an oneiric terra mentis or mental landscape, one that uncannily brings to light aspects of narrative that perhaps should remain hidden or repressed. Scholarship generally regards Carl Jung’s archetypes and theory of the collective unconscious as key to understanding McCarthy’s work. A Freudian analytical framework, nevertheless, highlights the novel’s Gothic heritage, a liminal realm wrought by the blurring of boundaries and the imbrication of oppositions, exposing intellectual indeterminacy and repressed subconscious truth. The novel’s Janus-faced paradoxical composition, like Freud’s essay “The Uncanny,” escapes authorial control and speaks “other” than intended, revealing that which should have remained hidden—reporting on narrative’s coeval, unheimlich underside—its evasions, delusions, self-justification, and violence. Contrasting formulations between Freud and Jung of the uncanny reflect the ambivalent hermeneutic undecidability in McCarthy’s novel—a parallactic interplay of the transcendent and nihilistic.