Cormac McCarthy created a tradition of violence and desolation in American literature, dismembering the 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. Similarly, Elizabeth Bowen treats Blitz-era London as a city gripped by terror and full of marginalized individuals. In his short story "Mysterious Kor" Bowen creates characters who are the product of their environment: isolated, emotionally blocked, and in the midst of individual existential crises. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Cormac McCarthy's prose style has become recognizable for its solidity and impenetrable resistance to interpretation, while retaining a universally recognized poeticism and lyrical nature. Associated with the great writers of the American canon, McCarthy's writing professes a sense of brutality and pastoral beauty, critic Steven Shaviro stating that his "sublime prose style resonates with those of Faulkner, Melville and the King James Bible." ] In The Road McCarthy pushes his deadpan writing even further, eliminating all unnecessary additions to produce prose as bleak and desolate as the world he is describing. To grapple with a world that has lost nearly everything in a nameless, inexplicable disaster, McCarthy strips his prose of overt metaphors and similes. His description of this new world is sparse and devoid of unnecessary adjectives, creating a bleak and inhospitable environment. “On the opposite side of the river valley the road passed through a sharp black burn. Charred, branchless tree trunks extend on all sides. Ash moving across the street and the sagging arms of dead wire stretched from blackened light poles groaning thinly in the wind. A burnt house in a clearing and beyond an expanse of barren gray meadows and a bank of raw red mud where roadworks lay abandoned. Up ahead were billboards advertising motels.”[2]In this passage, as in the rest of the novel, McCarthy creates an environment that is at once identifiably American but unrecognizable and unimaginable. It presents a land of open rural plains similar to the conventional image of the American prairie, a concept usually associated with safety and an easy, pleasant life. By reversing the given associations of this scene McCarthy creates a space of uncertainty and mistrust. Grasslands no longer mean agricultural stability and abundant food, but rather the loss of such comforts. Abandoned roadworks symbolize the loss of industry and the economy. But this loss is juxtaposed with the road that remains a constant throughout the novel, creating an excavated memory of evolving infrastructure and thus serves as a comparison between this recently dead America and the long-dead civilizations of the ancient world. But what permeates McCarthy's post - Apocalyptic America, wherever the paths of the protagonist couple made up of father and son move, is the overbearing sense of grey. Whether it is “bare gray meadows,” “tatters of clothes thrown against the wall, all gray in the ashes” [Page 95] or “the cold gray light” [Page 199] gray surrounds travelers and is the appearance more evident than their environment. This overbearing presence of gray in the novel creates a sense of claustrophobia that the protagonists cannot escape or deny, symbolizing the destiny that has consumedthis now cremated Earth and, more immediately for father and son, humanity. In his essay '“The cold illucid world”: The poetics of gray in Cormac McCarthy's The Road', Chris Danta observes that this color “marks the apocalypse in this novel – or, to be more precise, the gray marks the fragility of the post -apocalyptic, in which everything seems to be heading, like the central figure of the father, inexorably towards death".[3] Therefore, gray comes to symbolize that in this world humanity and the environment in which it lives are both marked by death. The ash is unavoidable, face masks are required to avoid breathing it, and it prevents sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface, so the environment is designed by McCarthy to act as a sort of immediate death sentence. McCarthy creates an environment in The Road that is the ultimate, unbeatable antagonist. The man and boy ignore this fact, focusing instead on the horrors of their amoral, cannibalistic counterparts, never realizing that it is the land they live in that will ultimately kill them. Whether it was a respiratory disease caused by inhaling ash, starvation due to infertile soil, cremation caused by forest fires, or freezing to death in their sunless world, the man and his son were doomed from the first day to lose their battle for survival because no matter how hard they try they can never escape the ghostly ghost of grey. Thus McCarthy argues that the end of humanity will not be caused by the wars it wages against itself or the next epidemic it will face, but rather by the Earth crumbling under the stress of its inhabitants. As The Road approaches the reader, the ash accumulates suffocating them, "Mysterious Kor" does the opposite but with the same result. In her story Elizabeth Bowen creates a wartime London emptied and devoid of human feelings. In the opening of the story Bowen writes “London seemed like the capital of the moon: shallow, cratered, extinct”.[4] By comparing London to the capital of the moon, Bowen creates an immediate sense of emptiness and insurmountable distance from reality. London is immediately associated as a cold, lonely and otherworldly city, emphasized by Bowen's association with emptiness and a pause in time or reality. This break in reality is created by the phrase “Germans are no longer bombed by the full moon.” [Page 990] The moon, throughout the story, serves as a metaphor for loneliness and estrangement from reality, so the fact that the Germans no longer use moonlight to find easy targets during their air raids creates an atmospheric sense of surrealism. The environment of the characters in the stories, Arthur, Pepita and Callie, does not really exist, but is rather a sort of imaginary world caused by the overwhelming presence of war. Even if the Germans are not physically flying over London, they are still there in the imagination, creating an environment of fear and distrust of the abnormal that is simultaneously incapable of returning to reality. The war has made London an expansive city of emptiness and meaninglessness. “The uselessness of the blackout has become ridiculous” [Page 990] and “the now gateless park gates” [Page 990] show how the necessities of war have created an unnecessarily dark environment of undefined boundaries. The Road creates a dystopia through its characters' inability to escape the claustrophobic nature of their world, "Mysterious Kor" creates one by preventing its characters from finding anything solid and defined in the vast, empty spaces of London. For Bowen, London truly becomes the barren and forgotten city of “Mysterious Kor” from the sonnet “She”.[5]The environment of both texts leads to the alienation of their characters due tospecific circumstances they create. The Road is made up of a hostile world, 'Mysterious Kor' on the contrary is surreally passive and docile, but both are inhabited by characters separated from humanity by both physical and mental barriers. The father and son duo of The Road see themselves as the last "good guys" [Page 81] in a world where disaster has pushed what's left of humanity into a life of brutality, violent instinct and, above all, horrifyingly, cannibalism . As they travel along the road, father and son encounter four major obstacles produced by this new world order of amorality: a convoy of supposedly cannibalistic nomads; a pregnant woman and three men who, after the birth of the child, roast it; a cellar full of refugees held to be slaughtered for food; and a lonely man who steals all their belongings. All these encounters serve to testify how father and son, even if not perfect, certainly still belong to the best part of their species. Everyone in McCarthy's post-apocalyptic America is driven by the need for survival, but it is how they act on this drive that defines their character. One thing separates the father from the rest of the adults in his world: his son. Throughout the novel the son serves as a moral compass for his father, it is thanks to him that they help the wandering traveler Ely and leave clothes for the thief on the beach. As Paul Sheehan observes in his essay 'Road, Fire, Trees: Cormac McCarthy's post-America', children "have instincts to share, to assist, to care for others – instincts that would otherwise be absent from the world".[ 6] ] Therefore, the child, both our protagonist and childhood as a whole, symbolizes innocence and morality. The fact that it is precisely the hope of his peers that makes the child trust the man he meets after his father's death underlines this further: “Do you have children? We do. Do you have a boy? We have a boy and a girl. How old is he? He's about your age. Maybe a little bigger. And you didn't eat them? No. You don't eat people. No. We don't eat people. And I can come with you. Yes. You can. "Okay then." Even if the man lies to the child, luring him into a false sense of trust enough to disarm him of the gun his father made him hold, the presence of childhood is still significant. Children allow trust of existing in a world where nothing can be trusted. If the child is the moral character, then the father is the immoral one, but this immorality is created by necessity: he shoots a nomad because he poses a threat to his son , distrusts Ely because he is short of food for himself and his son, and takes the thief's clothes as a form of punishment for a crime that would undoubtedly lead to death are wrong, his son never allows him to forget and ignore what he has done. This duo, one totally moral and one clinging to their tatters, are in clear contrast to their cannibalistic counterparts. From a psychoanalytic point of view it is clear that the the son is the superego, the father is the ego and the rest of humanity is the id. There is no doubt that if the father were not to take care of his son he would fall into this new tradition of violence and amorality. But since he has to take care of his son, he separates them from the rest of humanity. Alienation in The Road is the result of maintaining one's morality. The father and his son separate themselves from the rest of the world believing that they live as pariahs because of their goodness. McCarthy's characters are alienated from the world because of the invisible but undeniably central role that morality plays in their lives, in contrast to the trio of protagonists in "Mysterious Kor." Bowen's story is set in Londonwhere imagination creates barriers between individuals, leaving characters alone and emotionally isolated. As discussed previously, the moon, a metaphor for both loneliness and imagination (creating an immediate connection between the two), saturates the entire story, both in the empty streets of London and in the compact apartment that Pepita and Callie share. Pepita is the character most associated with the moon because it is she who first refers to the fictional city of Kor and it is she who Callie has decided will sleep in the moonlight. This constant presence that the moonlight has on Pepita creates in her a mindset focused on possibilities and what can or cannot be. “This war shows that we are by no means at the end. If you can make entire places disappear, you can make entire places explode. I don't see why not." [Page 991] Outside and bathed in moonlight, Pepita questions the limits of her imagination as she replaces London with Kor. These questions, however, lead to a distance with her lover, Arthur, when she says “When we come to the end, Kor may be the only city left: the permanent city. I should laugh” [Page 991] This dissociation from reality, the concentration on the city he has imagined, and the lack of concern for the real inhabitants of London cause Arthur to respond with “No, you wouldn't… You wouldn't – at least , I hope not. I hope you don't know what you're saying: does the moon make you funny?" The moon, and therefore the imagination, distances Pepita from Arthur, leading Victoria Glendinning to write that Pepita is a character "who has a 'greedy dream' in which Kor is more compelling than her lover." Pepita alienates herself because of her imagination. She creates boundaries in an already hostile and desolate reality, making her character often dissociative and distant from those around her. Cormac McCarthy's The Road and "Mysterious Kor" by Elizabeth Bowen have worlds in which the environment has a direct effect on the characters who inhabit their spaces. . Although these environments are markedly different, one claustrophobically rural and the other empty and urban, both produce alienated characters. The Father and The Road's son retain an outdated and counterproductive sense of what is ethically good, an attitude that does not fit the environment of brutal realism in which they live, and thus are hostile to those around them. Instead, Pepita, Arthur, and Callie are placed in a reality that proves too much to handle and so they become alienated from the world around them and take comfort in the seemingly infinite powers of their imagination. Both McCarthy and Bowen suggest that alienation is a direct product of an individual's environment but, more optimistically, the product of a negative environment alone. Father and son abandon the rest of humanity only because of the scorched America they live in, and Bowen's protagonists are simply unable to face the horrors that war presents to them. It is the spaces in which we live, therefore, that determine whether we will act inclusively towards our society or, like McCarthy and Bowen's characters, exclude ourselves from the world. Works Cited[1]Steven Shaviro, '“The True Life of Darkness”: A Reading of the Blood Meridian', in Cormac McCarthy, ed. by Harold Bloom, [New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009], pp. 16. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.[2]Cormac McCarthy, The Road, [New York: Picador, 2010], pp. 6. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.[3]Chris Danta, '“The cold illucid world”: The poetics of gray in Cormac McCarthy's The Road', in The Styles of Extinction, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and. by Julian Murphet and Mark Steven, [New York: Continuum, 2012], pp. 10. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.[4]Elizabeth Bowen, 'Mysterious Kor', in.