Abstract:

American famous contemporary novelist Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, which was published in 2006, was highly praised by readers and won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2007. McCarthy conveys a kind of poetic sense of cruelty which only novel has, depicts a black and white world fully filled with darkness, wildness and brutality after the end of the world. Domestic scholars mainly study The Road in the perspective of ecology, while this article uses a view of dystopian literature to analyze the environment, main characters’ awareness, and on the basis of these, to explore the dystopia of literature and effectiveness of real life.

Keywords: The Road; dystopia; dystopian environment and ideology；realistic significance

摘  要：

美国当代著名小说家科马克•麦卡锡2006年出版小说《路》，受到读者的一致好评，并于2007 年获得了普利策小说奖。麦卡锡在这部小说中传递出了一种小说才具备的残酷的诗意感，描绘了世界末日后充斥着黑暗，荒芜，残暴的黑白世界。国内学者主要以生态学的角度来研究《路》，本文用反乌托邦文学的视角对《路》中的环境，主人公的意识进行分析，在此基础上探讨文学中的反乌托邦主义以及对现实生活的影响。

关键词：《路》；反乌托邦主义；反乌托邦环境和意识；现实意义

1 Introduction
Cormac McCarthy was one of the most influential American novelists in his age, who has now written more than ten books including Gothic, western, postmodern prediction as well as a lot of other topics. The Road is McCarthy’s tenth work, in which he presents the real affection between the father and the son which never retreats and the environment after the end of the world. This work awarded him the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2006. Although the novel has received numerous positive reviews and honors since its release, some critics have deemed it heartbreaking, haunting and emotionally shattering. The fiction mainly tells that an unnamed father and his young son journey across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a major unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and most life on the earth. During their road to the south, they encounter countless difficulties and obstacles, also face situations which challenge the bottom line of human moral standards. The father has a firm belief that they are the good guys who carry the fires even though at the end before he succumbs to an illness, he encourages his boy to live on.