I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing. --Cormac McCarthy, Whales and Men The Holy Grail is a standard symbol in the English language for an object of search far-off, mysterious, out of reach. --Dhira B. Mahoney, The Grail: A Casebook Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), with its ashen, post-apocalyptic landscape, seems a striking departure from the realism of his earlier novels. Inspired in part by grim images of wanderers in "biohazard" suits or wearing masks and goggles "like ruined aviators" (The Road 51, 24), many critics identify the unnamed catastrophe that precipitates the novel as a nuclear holocaust (see e.g., Christman). McCarthy himself imagines the disaster to be a meteor strike, although he claims that "his money is on humans destroying each other before an environmental catastrophe sets in" (Kushner). Yet few critics have explored just how unusual the fantastic and futuristic landscape of The Road is. In an interview regarding the Coen brothers' film of his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, McCarthy claims that he prefers literary realism over more "magical" genres. "[I]t's hard enough to get people to believe what you're trying to tell them without making it impossible," he says. "You have to make it vaguely plausible" (Grossman 63). While The Road does bear McCarthy's typical attention to accuracy in all the minutiae of his descriptions, the excesses of carnage and apocalyptic horror in its pages may stretch the limits of credulity. In fact, one critic finds the world of the novel so sublimely damaged that it must have a "supernatural cause," and he therefore concludes that The Road is a retelling of the Book of Revelation (Grindley 12). The fantastic elements in the novel, however, are not supernatural allegory, but mythological motif. The novel's title in an early draft was The Grail, (1) a title illustrative of the narrative arc in which a dying father embarks on a quest to preserve his son, whom he imagines as a "chalice" (McCarthy, The Road 64), the symbolic vessel of divine healing in a realm blighted by some catastrophic disease. The motifs of the Waste Land, the dying Fisher King, and the potentially unattainable healing balm in the cup of Christ provide particularly apt metaphors through which The Road examines pervasive apocalyptic fears in order to explore if and how the human project may be preserved. It may be useful first to establish common grail motifs before investigating their application in The Road. The principal early "Grail" texts fall into two general categories: chivalric romances about King Arthur's knights encountering the grail and histories of the grail from the time of Christ to its removal to Britain. The first category has been the most influential in terms of those stories' impact upon subsequent literature. This category includes Chretien de Troyes' Conte del Graal, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, and the Queste del Saint Graal (Loomis 1). (See Loomis 2-4 and Weston 12-15.) The first two of these texts in particular have as the quest hero the Arthurian knight Perceval, as well as the most common and consistent narrative tropes (Weston 15). In this storyline, Perceval is a young boy raised in the wilderness by his mother after his knight-father's death in battle. The wild, untrained boy one day sees some of Arthur's knights riding in the woods. Captivated by the sight, he follows them to Arthur's court, leaving his mother grief-stricken; she later dies of her grief. During his journey, Perceval finds two men fishing in a boat. One of the men is the Fisher King, who offers the boy hospitality for the night. At the Fisher King's castle, Perceval sees an older king dying of a grievous wound. Perceval fails to ask the "right question" (a question relating either to what ails the older man, who is usually the Fisher King's father, or whom the grail serves). …

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科马克·麦卡锡的《作为世界末日圣杯叙事的道路》

我相信我们是约柜，我们的真实本性不是愤怒、欺骗、恐怖、逻辑、技巧甚至悲伤。这是渴望。——Cormac McCarthy, Whales and Men 圣杯是英语中的标准符号，用于寻找遥远、神秘、遥不可及的对象。——Dhira B. Mahoney, The Grail: A Casebook Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006)，其灰白的世界末日后风景，似乎与他早期小说的现实主义截然不同。部分受到穿着“生化危机”套装或戴着面具和护目镜“就像被毁坏的飞行员”（The Road 51, 24）的流浪者的严峻形象的启发，许多评论家将这部小说的未命名灾难确定为核大屠杀（参见例如，克里斯特曼）。麦卡锡本人认为这场灾难是一次流星撞击，尽管他声称“ 一位评论家认为小说的世界受到如此崇高的破坏，以至于它一定有“超自然的原因”，因此他得出​​结论，《路》是对启示录（格林德利 12）的重述。然而，小说中的奇幻元素并不是超自然的寓言，而是神话主题。小说在早期草稿中的标题是圣杯，（1）这个标题说明了一个垂死的父亲开始寻求保护他的儿子的叙事弧线，他将儿子想象成一个“圣杯”（麦卡锡，道路 64） ，在遭受某些灾难性疾病困扰的领域中神圣治愈的象征性容器。荒原的主题，垂死的渔王，基督之杯中可能无法获得的治疗香膏提供了特别恰当的比喻，通过这些比喻，The Road 检查普遍存在的世界末日恐惧，以探索人类计划是否以及如何得以保留。在研究它们在 The Road 中的应用之前，先建立共同的圣杯图案可能会很有用。主要的早期“圣杯”文本分为两大类：关于亚瑟王的骑士遇到圣杯的骑士浪漫史，以及从基督时代到圣杯被转移到英国的历史。就这些故事对后续文学的影响而言，第一类是最有影响力的。此类别包括 Chretien de Troyes 的 Conte del Graal、Wolfram von Eschenbach 的 Parzival 和 Queste del Saint Graal (Loomis 1)。（参见 Loomis 2-4 和 Weston 12-15。）这些文本中的前两篇尤其将亚瑟王骑士 Perceval 作为任务英雄，以及最常见和一致的叙事比喻（Weston 15）。在这个故事情节中，珀西瓦尔是一个小男孩，在他的骑士父亲在战斗中去世后，他的母亲在荒野中长大。有一天，这个未经训练的狂野男孩看到亚瑟的一些骑士在树林里骑马。被眼前的景象迷住了，他跟着他们来到了亚瑟的宫廷，留下悲痛欲绝的母亲；她后来死于悲伤。在他的旅途中，Perceval 发现两个人在一条船上钓鱼。其中一个人是费舍尔国王，他在晚上招待男孩。在费舍尔国王的城堡里，珀西瓦尔看到一位年长的国王死于重伤。Perceval 未能提出“正确的问题” （这个问题要么是关于老人的病痛，他通常是渔夫国王的父亲，要么是圣杯为谁服务）。…