Lonesome Landscapes; Environment and Alienation in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Mysterious Kor’ Jack Green College

Cormac McCarthy has created a tradition in American literature of violence and desolation, his work dismembering American myth and replacing it with a brutal, epic and often uncomfortable reality. In The Road McCarthy maintains the hallmarks of his previous work but shifts his focus from nihilistic violence to post-climate change concerns, exploring the landscape of a post-apocalyptic America and its effects on the human psyche. In a similar way, Elizabeth Bowen treats blitz-era London as a city in the grips of terror and brimming with marginalized individuals. In her short story ‘Mysterious Kor’ Bowen creates characters who are products of their environment: isolated, emotionally stemmed and in the midst of individual existential crises.

Cormac McCarthy’s style of prose has become recognizable for its solidity and impenetrable resistance to interpretation, yet still retaining a universally recognised poeticism and lyrical nature. Associated with the great writers of the American canon, McCarthy’s writing professes a sense of pastoral brutality and beauty, the critic Steven Shaviro stating that his “sublime prose style resonates with those of Faulkner, of Melville and of the King James Bible.”[1] In The Road McCarthy pushes his...