Introduction

2In classic road narratives such as On the Road (Jack Kerouac, 1957) or Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1979), the scenic landscapes reminiscent of western films inherit a connotation of exploration, freedom, and new beginnings (Brasebin 82). But at the end of the 20^th century, the rapid evolution of technology, the growing environmental consciousness, and the looming specter of global catastrophe were collectively reshaping the road narrative into another form—post-apocalyptic road journeys. Post-apocalyptic and dystopian fictions, a sub-genre of science fiction, have favored the iconography of the road both in literature and film since George Miller’s 1979 Mad Max, followed by David Brin’s short story The Postman in 1982. This type of fiction depicts the collapse of civilization and the survival of a few individuals among the ruins. However, road infrastructures survive most cataclysms, and thus remain a recurring guideline for wandering survivors. Post-apocalyptic fictions often deal with mobility as a requirement for survival. Many of these fictions gather most characteristics of the road narrative and can be categorized as a sub-genre: post-apocalyptic road narratives. What I propose here is to determine how this sub-genre questions the ideology underpinning the genre itself and the travel stories it tells.

3Roads were supposed to lead the pioneers, and later, the Beat Generation to freedom. Along his journey on the road, the hero would conquer new lands, grow up, liberate themselves; they would also meet their fellow Americans and gain consciousness of the Nation (Bakhtin 386; Brasebin 112). To tell these types of stories, the road narrative must rely upon ideologies of colonization, capitalism, liberalism, and individualism. It conveys a political and ethical way of seeing the world, travelling the country, and socializing with other people. However, the post-apocalyptic setting brings an end to the society based on these ideologies (Yeates 4‑5). Where does the road lead after the apocalypse? What type of society can the road journey help to build, when the social contract itself is torn? In other words, the road narrative is based on a relationship to land and to the others which is the cause of the apocalypse in most dystopian science fiction—so how can post-apocalyptic road narratives even exist? Can a post-apocalyptic road narrative face its ideological legacy while inventing another way to build a society—and proposing another ethics of travel?

4The films and novels I have chosen to compare stage various forms of apocalypse: wildfires, massive extinction of women, and of natural species. These environmental crises lead to social crises: no one bears the responsibility for the apocalypse, but everyone preys on one another; people no longer act collectively and seem unable to include this new state of humanity into social history. “If not, then who?” reproachfully asks a billboard for wildfires prevention in Dave Eggers’s novel Heroes of the Frontier, underlining the stark absence of anyone taking collective responsibility either for the present or for the future. This societal collapse is central to post-apocalyptic narratives (Hicks 2016) and guided my selection of works, from Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) and its film adaptation by John Hillcoat (2009) to Dave Eggers’s Heroes of the Frontier (2016) and Casey Affleck’s 2019 film Light of my Life. McCarthy’s masterpiece is famously dark; the other works also shift the road narrative into darker places, confronting it with dystopian, yet disturbingly familiar and realistic views of the world. Eggers’s novel deals with the massive wildfires in Alaska, a smaller-scale cataclysm compared to the global pandemic and extinctions depicted by the other works. My hypothesis about these four works it that they deconstruct the underlying ideology of the road narrative and outline another way to tell road stories, relying on an ethical proposition. Keeping that in mind, I will first discuss how these works weave post-apocalyptic journeys into an American national narrative. I will further delve into how they all grapple with the paradox of navigating within a self-destructing society and engage in a discussion of the ethics of survival through the themes of legacy, transmission, and education.

1. Weaving the American national narrative along the road

1.1 From territory to nation: a narrative of mobility

6This American history of mobility is tied to the construction of the road infrastructures which contributed to western expansion, facilitating the movement of people, goods, as well as information (mail), and the military (Brasebin 13-14). The conquest of the American territory is thus associated with a “mythology of the road”, to borrow Morris Dickstein’s expression (Dickstein 96), which structures the nation’s relationship to space, territory, and its history (Brasebin 273). The road is the common axis through which travel narratives on American territory have been recounted, from pioneers and pilgrims to adventure tales and postmodern, even post-apocalyptic, wanderings; thus, the chronotope of the road becomes the spacetime in which the American national narrative is articulated, in both literature and cinema.

1.2 Postmodernity of the road narrative

7Many scholars have worked to historicize the American road narrative (for example, Mills 2006). They mostly situate the inauguration of the genre with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), in literature, and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) in movie theaters, while arguing that it is a postmodern genre in the sense that road narratives refer to and deconstruct their literary history and legacy (Brasebin 347). In many ways, the road narrative is the narrative of a closed frontier and therefore comes after the western: the heroes of the road imitate the pioneers’ westward journey, but their journey is now emptied of any collective project of settlement (Brasebin 292). On the Road and Easy Rider, along with many other narratives, strip the mythology of the road of its conquering dimension to transform it into a space of wandering and loss of bearings: “the genius of On the Road was to attach the new restlessness to the classic American mythology of the road” writes Dickstein (96).

8Where to now, since West is no longer an option? The heroes of classic road narratives follow the roads in various directions, sometimes going around in circles. In Heroes of the Frontier Josie and her kids go north, as do Rag and her father in Light of my Life; the Man and his son go south in The Road. These post-frontier wanderings answer to the limitedness of the national territory; but they still align with the Frontier ideology of winning one’s “safe place” over the wilderness, navigating deep forests, mountain passes, barren landscapes. Postmodern road narratives somehow manage to reject American society while still aligning with its ideology and its dialectics of mobility, providing an example of how countercultures are always absorbed into dominant culture (Bidaud).

9The road narrative’s postmodern interrogation of American geography can also apply to the development of industry and technical progress. The mythology of progress, described in Michael Adas’s Machines as the Measure of Men as a tool of expansion and domination, and closely associated to European journeys of exploration and colonization (1-19), can also specifically be associated with the colonization of American territory and the nation’s westward expansion. Technical progress indeed fed the Frontier mythology and ideology, as the road towards the Pacific evolved from pathways to railways to highways. In the road narrative, the goal of technical progress in means of transportation shifts from exploration to increased speed—for example the transition from horses in Westerns to motorcycles in Easy Rider studied by Brasebin (290-294). David Laderman has highlighted the link between motorized transportation and the development of American cinema (44), arguing that technical progress not only increases mobility in terms of speed, distance, efficiency, and accessibility, but also impacts the representations of this mobility. However, the post-apocalyptic context shows the limitations of technical progress—the limited quantities of fossil fuels, for instance, which the development of means of transportation has ignored, becomes brutally relevant in Mad Max. If progress is brought to a stop, how is the travelers’ mobility affected?

1.3 Putting American dialectics of progress and mobility to the test

10The road narrative as it originated in the 1950s was an ode to free mobility, closely tied to the development of the automobile industry. The motor vehicle (motorcycle, car, truck, bus) thus became an integral part of the iconography of the road movie (Moser), which is present in all four works discussed here. The travelers in Heroes of the Frontier journey in a grotesque camper, often reduced to the technical issues it presents—largely associated with waste disposal. This camper will finally go up in smoke at the end of the novel, consumed by wildfires. From being a mythical vessel of “a million other wayward travelers” (Eggers 4), the RV proudly named “le Chateau” gradually evolves into an object of paranoia: it is invaded by foul, poisonous odors; Josie believes that a man pursuing them has climbed on its back ladder and is clinging onto it, preying on them; in the end she is desperate to get rid of the vehicle, convinced that anyone following them would recognize it far too easily. Alongside the descriptions of the camper, the depiction of the road trip also evolves: the road progressively transforms from the spacetime of an identity quest, free from responsibilities, into a spacetime of uprooting, leading to extreme precariousness when Josie and her children finally find themselves sleeping in a gymnasium, relying on soup kitchens, all their belongings gone with the camper. It is as if the novel, by gradually intensifying the atmosphere of anxiety prevailing in the world, were putting the American dialectics of mobility to the test: the freedom and rebellious wandering of the classic road narrative gradually give way to forced mobility and dispossession in growing insecurity. My point is that the post-apocalyptic context of a burning Alaska undermines the road narrative’s assumptions that mobility equals freedom. Heroes of the Frontier stages a family’s anxious, erratic flight forward—and neither the Alaskan landscape, nor the endless roads, nor the camper can turn it into a transcending journey. For Josie and her children, mobility equals precariousness; this shift of the road novel’s dialectics of mobility brings us to wonder for whom, and under what conditions, the road is a space of freedom. As others have argued, the kind of mobility depicted in the road story is gendered (Mills 134; Vice 210); free wandering on the road further depends on age, race, and class criteria (Do Huu, “La Route en mode mineur” 5). Josie and her children’s misadventures shed light on a bourgeois dimension of the road narrative: the road cannot transcend just anyone into a “hero of the frontier”—for some like Josie, the road will only dispossess them further.

11The dialectics of mobility are reconfigured differently in The Road and Light of my Life, whose characters primarily travel on foot. But the post-apocalyptic world is not devoid of motor vehicles. One of the first to appear in Hillcoat’s film (00:12:40) is a truck loaded with armed men, visually reminiscent of Miller’s Mad Max—menacing and monstrous, an instrument of terror and predation. Yet, for the protagonists of the novel and of both films, vehicles are stripped of their driving dimension: almost all the cars on screen are immobilized, abandoned at the roadside (a classic iconography of post-apocalyptic films). Vehicles are mostly treated as referring to another version of the road narrative. Within the diegesis, they signal the passage of time and contribute to the construction of a post-apocalyptic chronotope of the road; in these dystopian futures, cars are no longer the impetus of movement, but serve as shelters, as if they could bring the characters back into the safe, golden age of the road. The scene of the car theft in Light of my Life (1:11:30) is revealing: when Rag and her father hitch a ride, the girl curls up on the backseat of the car, buried under blankets, while the young driver’s voice-over, oblivious of her gender, explains that there are “females” locked in a bunker in the camp where he lives. At this moment, Rag’s father devises a trick to steal the vehicle and leaves the young man behind. A bit later, when they are parked in the snow, Rag asks her father what a bunker is— “it’s a kind of shelter,” he responds. Confronted with the bunker, the quintessential survivalist shelter—here repurposed as a prison where women are raised like livestock—the car, relic of another time, becomes a makeshift refuge. The “spatiotemporal capsule” of the vehicle (Brasebin 161) has lost its characteristic velocity to become an immobilized hideout detached from time and History.

12The role of the motorized vehicle in American dialectics of mobility has long been questioned in road narratives such as Into the Wild (Krakauer, 1996), in which the character abandons his car, or David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) whose character travels on a lawn mower. Post-apocalyptic road narratives also conjure up another type of question: as early as 1979, George Miller’s Mad Max, set in another former frontier of the British Empire, Australia, dealt not with the limitedness of land but with the scarcity of resources—mostly fossil fuels—which led to the limitedness of human cooperation once survival is at stake. This first instance of a post-apocalyptic road movie therefore elaborates not on the rebellion against society but on the self-destruction of society.

13In other words, while postmodern road narratives somehow managed to reject American society while still aligning with its ideology and its dialectics of mobility, post-apocalyptic road narratives go a step further. Instead of developing on the limitedness of American territory and institutions, they are based on their self-destruction. We can begin to apprehend the paradox here: road narratives are framed into an ideology that led the nation to apocalypse—so how can post-apocalyptic road narratives grapple with these themes without self-destructing?

2. Recounting the End of the Nation

14In the biblical sense, “apocalypse” is defined as a revelation about the end of times, in the form of a story. From this narratological perspective is derived the commonly held understanding of “apocalypse” as a global catastrophe causing a massive extinction of species and biodiversity. Most post-apocalyptic stories grow out of a sense of doom present in the Bible, but also out of the idea that humanity is bound to face its comeuppance: with or without the mediation of a vengeful God, the apocalypse implies that humanity was the artisan of its own destruction—unlike the Hollywood genre of disaster films, which often took on the pretext of a foreign (natural or extra-terrestrial) threat to depict the union of Humanity to fight back.

15In post-apocalyptic narratives, the catastrophe cannot be avoided; they are interested in what comes after. The works I have chosen to study deal with different kinds of catastrophes: some are ecological, some are social and demographical, some are total. All, however, are man-made, whether they can be blamed on overpopulation, overexploitation of resources, or an infinite greed for power and progress. Their first consequence is the end of society as a collective organization based on a social contract.

2.1 The end of society

16Many critics and scholars have emphasized the connection between McCarthy’s novel published in 2006 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (Sullivan; Bueno). In The Road, the reign of terror is indeed pushed to its extreme following an unspecified cataclysm that has burned the United States (and presumably the rest of the world) to the ground and caused a massive extinction of species and biodiversity. Fauna and flora are no longer, only a few human beings and at least one dog remain. The road journey of the two protagonists, a father and his son, is punctuated by fear: the fear of tomorrow, the anguish of succumbing to cold or hunger, but also the palpable terror of organized bands of cannibals, rapists, and murderers who also roam the roads. The novel was adapted into a film by John Hillcoat in 2009.

17The anticipation of terror also permeates Affleck’s film, released in 2019. This time, a health cataclysm referred to as “the plague” has decimated one half of the population, women. Light of my Life depicts an aging society where there are only men left and, inevitably, hardly any children. Society is also affected economically: schools are deserted, of course, but so are the streets of cities, and residents queue for food rations—stark images echoing those of the United States during the COVID pandemic that followed the film’s release in theatres. As in The Road, a father and his child (this time a daughter, disguised as a little boy), travel the roads and forest paths while avoiding encounters. The reasons for avoiding other people are as obvious to the viewer as they are to the father, played by Affleck himself, but they are not so clear to the young Rag—unlike The Road’s boy, she cannot put words or images to the danger she faces; the word rape is never uttered in the film. The protagonists’ moves from one place to another, as well the film’s structure and suspense, are built around a silent, terrifying threat against which the father vows to protect his child—as in The Road.

18Compared to these two stories, Heroes of the Frontier, a novel published in 2016, is much lighter. It is not science fiction or speculative narrative: the catastrophe at its heart strikes North America every summer, i.e. wildfires. I consider it a post-apocalyptic narrative in the sense that it deals with a defeat of society and any relationship to community: the story is governed by a sense of doom and does not delve into the resolution of the catastrophe—the climate crisis has already happened, America is already burning, and the characters are merely trying to survive as individuals. Josie flees the catastrophes of her life—the loss of her parents, a divorce, the death of a friend, the loss of her dental practice—and takes her two children, Paul and Ana, on a road trip in Alaska aboard an RV named “the Chateau”. The journey quickly becomes a forward escape from the spreading wildfires and the fear they kindle, a fear intensified by Josie’s growing paranoia, as she becomes convinced that her ex-husband is on their trail.

19These three different settings emphasize the fear and anxiety, both individual and collective, that govern the narratives and the characters’ journeys on the road. Terror is the new principle that rules human interactions, suggesting that the old forms of social organization are gone—but are they really? Does the road narrative’s continuity before and after the apocalypse materialize a historic continuity?

2.2 The end of History

20The line of the road materializes a timeline that Bakhtin calls the “path of life”: the road behind represents the past, while the road ahead symbolizes the future (269). However, in the following shot/reverse shot from The Road, the past is desolate and barren; present survival is contained within an old supermarket cart; and the future is overwhelmed by a dooming, graffiti-covered billboard once advertising a resort at the next exit, now featuring a threatening quote from the Old Testament: “Behold the valley of slaughter. Jeremiah 19:6”.

Fig. 1. Shot of the highwayFig. 2. Reverse shot of the highway

21Inbar Kaminsky has argued that the billboards, a representation of American consumer culture, have been subverted in The Road to “symbolize the demise of this very culture” (§29). In my opinion, the billboards can also be read as the sign of a re-appropriated but not entirely eradicated capitalism. Once tools of advertisement urging people to spend more, they now advertise slaughter: “They passed through towns that warned people away with messages scrawled on the billboards. The billboards had been whited out with thin coats of paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed” (McCarthy 127-128). The context has evolved, but the targeted readers are still preys caught in an economy of survival of the fittest. In fact, are not these bands of cannibals, surviving through organized predation and exploiting the weaker, making slaves and using women as livestock, the heirs of neoliberal capitalism? Thus, as Zizek and Jameson note, The Road illustrates that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Schleusener §14). The “palimpsest” of the billboards materializes the timeline of capitalism, before and after the apocalypse. Not only is American capitalism depicted as the paradigm of survival, but its traces are the only marks of historicity. Therefore, McCarthy’s novel scarcely addresses the catastrophe that has happened; critiques of the novel have spoken of an “unhistoried world” facing “structural amnesia” (Chabon; Bruyn 782). The post-apocalyptic collapse of the sociopolitical structures of the country disrupts the narrative frameworks of American history: institutions are gone, the library in The Road has burned, the schools in Light of my Life are deserted—so who is to write, teach and tell History? In McCarthy’s novel, the only remains of America’s history are Coca Cola cans and billboards, forcing the post-apocalyptic road narrative into yet another capitalist chronotope: only consumer culture can provide a narrative timeline for the story.

2.3 The end of memory

22It is not only the transmission of history and collective memory, but also that of personal memory which malfunctions within these narratives. The four children featured in the works share the commonality of missing one parent—half of their heritage. The boy’s mother committed suicide in The Road, Josie’s husband left and never calls, Rag’s mother died of the plague. All three remaining adults experience the resurfacing of their relationship with their departed or missing spouses in the form of haunting and hallucinations that are never shared with the children. “When she and Carl were together, they’d decided not to tell the kids anything about Candyland”, Josie recalls (Eggers 107). “Candyland”, the nickname of the vets hospital where Josie’s parents worked as nurses and became part of a massive scandal, becomes a metaphor for a shameful past that is not quite allowed into the main narrative. The characters’ backstory then appears as fractured, scattered, and concealed, and demands work on the reader’s part to be put together. The past is sometimes reduced to a mere haunting: Jeremy’s name is immediately associated to death but occurs thirty-nine times in the novel before we learn what happened to him—he enlisted and was killed in combat. Not long after that, a vet whom she has just met questions Josie’s memory, arguing that there are no US troops in Afghanistan anymore and Jeremy must have been killed in Iraq (Eggers 265). This episode not only questions the reliability of memory, signaling the past as a mere story we tell ourselves, but also the reliability of History:

Coast to coast, most Americans would not be sure that war was still on, that we were still there, that men and women like Jeremy were still fighting and dying, too. Wouldn’t an Afghan, and countless future generations, find that very funny in some way? (266)

23This passage suggests a lack of understanding of History. Most Americans do not know whether their country is still at war in Afghanistan, Josie realizes, thus there is no collective memory of this war—which might explain why Josie, her children and Jeremy’s parents cannot grieve for Jeremy collectively. Memory and history become conflicted, which makes the past feel even darker and unreachable. In the films, flashbacks are depicted as nightmares, swiftly appearing on screen without transition, only to be promptly discarded, as if the past were unbearable (Bruyn 782-785).

24The journey on the road traditionally refers to a metaphorical journey of remembrance (Brasebin 112-118); here the past, whether personal or national, is merely a haunting. Haunting, as theorized by Jacques Derrida (1997) and Jean-François Hamel (2006), is the mode of presence of that which has been erased and is trying to come back, yet not being fully allowed in the story or in the picture. The incomplete, unreliable, unbearable memories and history that these post-apocalyptic road journeys summon indeed seem to interfere with the narrative rather than help construct a logical storyline.

25Does a people’s inability to collectively tell their own story and every individual’s inability to make sense of their own past mean the end of the road story altogether? Apocalypse not only posits the destruction of the environment, the institutions, the social relationships, but also of the ideologies those human organizations rest upon. In other words, since the neoliberal capitalist society self-destructed while its paradigm remains the only one we know, the post-apocalyptic road narrative is choking on its own storytelling. The genre therefore deals with the extinction of a form of society and of narration.

3. Re-storying the road

26A genre, even a transmedial genre such as the road narrative, is a paradigmatic way of seeing and telling the world. It is based on ideology and ethics that form a framework into which space, time, and human interactions can be conceptualized, represented, and interpreted (Do Huu, L’Envers du Voyage 271-272). Previously cited scholars have demonstrated the postmodern deconstruction of the genre which is at work in the road novel and the road movie. I would like to argue that the subgenre of post-apocalyptic road narratives undertakes a criticism of the genre, but also of the ideology that underpins this genre and its individual consequences, which relate to ethics.

3.1 An impossible story

27Kaminsky interprets The Road as a pastiche of the road narrative by which “the road is gradually depleted of its symbolic role of guidance” (§3‑4). I prefer the term “parody” taken in its postmodern dimension as a “structural and functional relationship of critical revision” (Hutcheon 97). Egger’s title Heroes of the Frontier announces a parody of pioneer literature—when the novel will in fact turn out to be a parody of the road narrative itself—and thus provides the reader with a guiding line for a narrative that does not trust itself and perpetually self-invalidates. As early as Chapter 7 (out of 24), Josie invents a musical to tell her story, Disappointed: The Musical, on the premise that the audience’s expectations will consistently be disappointed. Another passage of the novel is both parodic and deceptive: it stages a classical scene from the road narrative, the roadside repair of the vehicle. Josie has just blown a tire when Paul, walking up the road, suddenly spots “a line of men in orange, ten of them, each of them carrying a shovel over a shoulder” (Eggers 273). This apparition of a row of prisoners theatrically replicates the topos of the prison road crew—except Josie does not realize they are inmates. Their performance of offering help to replace the Chateau’s tire takes the form of a stage comedy: “the group of them began to fan out all over, like some kind of dance team—Josie was suddenly in the middle, and felt as if she should do some freestyle maneuvers while they clapped” (273). One could interpret the scene as a reference to a musical road movie such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Coen & Coen)—which means Heroes of the Frontier uses the mythology of the road as a fiction, a show, a spectacle that can only be referred to—a spectacle where Josie and her children have no role.

But where was the Alaska of magic and clarity? This place was choked with the haze of a dozen forest fires, spread around the state like a prison break, and it was not majestic, no, not yet. All they’d seen so far was cluttered and tough. They’d seen seaplanes. They’d seen hundreds of homes for sale. They’d seen a roadside ad for a tree farm looking for a buyer. They’d seen another RV, not unlike theirs, parked on the side of the road, under a high sheer mountain wall. The mother of the family was squatting on the side of the road. They’d seen lacquered log cabin homes. They’d seen a convenience store also made of lacquered logs, a T-shirt that said Don’t blame me. I voted for the American.
So where were the heroes? (Eggers 5)

29Josie’s journey grapples with the ghosts of pioneers and with the ghost of Jeremy, with the fantasy of the person she would like to reborn as in Alaska; ultimately, the story itself seems to be wrestling with the ghost of another story that isn’t Josie’s: “To be a bird-watching guide in Homer, wow. Sam had it right. She had gone up to Alaska and opened her bird-watching operation, no fuss, didn’t ask anyone’s permission” (122). The mythology of the road has become an oppressive standard into which Josie’s story does not fit. As she recounts episodes of her past, Josie cannot make sense of who she is—no more than she can make sense of the drug scandal at the vets hospital, or the death of Jeremy in Afghanistan. Neither intimate nor national history seem to be able to fit into the timeline of the road narrative. Eggers’s novel, therefore, can be read as a post-apocalyptic vision of our contemporary world contemplating climate catastrophe, but also as a depiction of the end of times and of the narratives of these times. Heroes of the Frontier’s brilliant move is to deal with the self-destruction of the road narrative genre itself, and what type of storytelling survives after this apocalypse.

3.2 Ethics of the road story

30Storytelling is a big part of parent-children relationships, and the four works discussed here make no exception. Parenthood however, though a recurring feature in post-apocalyptic works (Olson et al. 5-7), is an unusual theme in road narratives where the heroes are often sons and daughters, not fathers and mothers. The chronotope of the road, according to Bakhtin, is a metaphoric timeline for the ages of life: the young man departs on the road, the grown man comes home (269). This proves true in most wandering stories from picaresque novels to Bildungsroman, while the road narrative, Brasebin argues, takes place at a later stage of life and pictures another turning point in the character’s lives: the departure on the road acts as a new beginning after a divorce or a loss for instance (104-105). This is exactly Josie’s situation in Heroes of the Frontier, while both fathers of Light of my Life and The Road have suffered the loss of their wives; however, they have their children by their side. Aged between five and ten, the children are not old enough to fit into the figure of the youngster leaving home, yet neither are they mere extras in the story.

31Far from being a detail, parenthood creates a tension between the two temporalities merged within the road narrative: that of an unbearable past with which the hero often seeks reconciliation (as seen in flashbacks), and that of an uncertain future for which the adult is responsible. To put it differently, parenthood reframes the chronotope of the road into a different timeline. The mnemonic aspect of the road trip is no longer about personal reconciliation; it becomes a matter of transmission. The adults are responsible for the world they bequeath to their children, and the children are their “warrant” for a better future: “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (McCarthy 5). A road narrative featuring a family implies a group dynamic, a collective responsibility in the journey. Family entails responsibility for the future and for each other; in other words, the road needs to provide some kind of education and ethics.

32However, I have shown above how the transmission of History and memory is failing in post-apocalyptic road narratives, because the apocalypse posits the destruction of human organizations and of the ideologies that underpin them. This also has ethical implications. At the beginning of Affleck’s film, Rag asks her father to explain the difference between morals and ethics (00:14:29). “Morals is an idea about right and wrong,” he replies, “and ethics is how those morals apply to a specific situation”. Ethics is mostly defined as the positioning of the self in the world, in relation to others, based on moral guidelines; it requires a recognition of the fact that the subjectivity of the other (“you”) equals that of the self (“I”). Ideology can then be opposed to ethics as it “proceeds from the reification of alterity as the foundation of a universal normativity” (Mineau and Larochelle). In post-apocalyptic road narratives, ideology (here, capitalism, neoliberalism) has led society to a dead-end. History, as the ideological narration of a shared past, can no longer be articulated. But it does not mean that nothing is transmitted by parents to children.

33On the road, stories as the means of education. The inclusion of shorter stories within the main narrative of a novel is a heritage from European wandering literature and the picaresque novel that has become a classic trait of the road narrative. The road hero often collects stories from the characters he or she meets along the way; here, it is the children who collect stories from their parents:

The son copes with the imperfectly understood and erratically imparted legacy of the past that he bears on his thin shoulders, attempting to reconcile the stories that his father tells him with what is around him, to square the entire vanished culture and civilization implied by every word of American English that he speaks with the “cauterized terrain” of the unhistoried world he has inherited. (Chabon)

34The Boy has a historiographical duty to reconstruct his heritage from the stories recounted by his father. But, as I have noted earlier, the past is fading, it becomes harder to grasp: “He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would be all lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory” (McCarthy 18). The parents mostly use tales and metaphors, rather than tell stories about the past. In The Road, the most recurring story is the fable according to which the father and his son are “carrying the fire” (83). A biblical story also inaugurates Light of my Life: a 12-minute-long single shot during which the father narrates a tale, reminiscent of Noah’s Ark, to his daughter. Both road movies feature such moments of storytelling or reading aloud. The books as well include inserted narratives: in Heroes of the Frontier, Josie invents stories for her son that mend the injustices of the world: the story of the “Underground Railroad” for alley cats, or the story of the cabin, built by the rangers, where stray dogs sleep at night. The storytelling is a ritual that reassures children and parent together (Andersen; Fledderjohann). But in post-apocalyptic road narratives, storytelling is also an ethical proposition to make sense of the “I” in the world. Telling a story positions the “I” of the narrator in front of the “you” of the audience; they engage in a mutual relationship (with each other) where the one speaks and the other listens. Furthermore, to tell a story is to make sense of the world and of one’s own place in it, therefore engaging in “the semantic space where the subject considers themselves in relation to alterity” which Mineau and Larochelle define as ethics (1996).

35Through the invention of stories, the transmission of collective and intimate memory can finally occur: to make sense of the traumas that fill her memory, Josie imagines musical comedies, humorous, grotesque, sad, satirical; then she composes a peculiar symphony through which she finally recounts her (and their) story to her children:

Suki [the singer], unasked, grew louder, and Josie liked that, and Frank grew louder, too, slicing his cello, vacillating between a few notes, Josie had no idea what notes, what chords, but they sounded like every disappointment, speaking for her terrible love of her poisonous past, every bit of it tasting bitter but filling her with a dark intoxicating fluid. The cello was the steady downward pull of lost time. (Eggers 346)

36I suggested earlier that Josie’s story does not fit into the line of the road narrative. The improvised symphony, the imaginary musical comedies, the children’s stories, the fables, are indeed narrative tangents parallel to the road’s trajectory; they indicate the fragmentation of narrative instances and the multiplicity of possible stories and narrators. They are a confession that neither the linear frame of the road narrative nor the single point of view of the storyteller are enough to tell all the stories. Ultimately pointing to the limitations of the narration, they invite the reader/spectator to counter-focalize the adult’s point of view, which means paying attention to what he or she does not see, does not hear, does not understand, does not say (Spivak). Counter-focalization is a way of making space in the narration for the stories, feelings and views of others; this third space (Bhabha 2007, 82) is a space of imagination and fiction posed as an ethical guideline for any narrative of travel (Forsdick, Fowler, et Kostova).

37Thus, at the end of Light of my Life, Rag takes up her father’s Ark story from the beginning of the film. The father’s version ended with the male character, a fox named Art, dreaming that his wife, “a young girl fox named Goldy” who had boarded Noah’s Ark, was starving and calling for help; Art built his own ark and went to save all the animals and Noah. But what if, says Rag at the end of the film, in Art’s dream, Goldy did not say “help” but “kelp”? The girl fox was not helpless without her husband and his craftiness; she was crafty too, and she yelled “kelp” to ask birds to bring kelp from the sea onto the Ark and feed the passengers so they would not starve. In the end, she saved the day, not Art. This new version of the story not only introduces a feminist point of view but also turns a tale of paranoia and survival into a narrative of collaboration and creativity. This fable urges the spectator to counter-focalize the father’s paranoid discourse and see the film and the world through Rag’s eyes.

38Paul, Ana, and the Boy, even when they keep silent, are alternative storytellers and keepers of other road stories. The figure of the child symbolizes the potential for post-apocalyptic rebirth and a future—but it also introduces a third space within a road narrative that was so far entrapped by its own design. Because they are characters whose point of view often remains unarticulated, the children become ethical warrants within the narrative: they guarantee that more stories will be told.

Conclusion

39In classic road narratives, heroes and vagabonds alike find freedom, new beginnings, and self-discovery on the road. The road journey represents the narrative of individual success, structured by liberalism and capitalism. But where does the road lead after this world has collapsed? What future lies ahead and, more importantly, can the road narrative outline another future? Are post-apocalyptic road narratives only variations of the same impossible (hi)story? Confronting the road narrative with the apocalypse means questioning the way America tells stories about her past and her future.

40What is at stake in the subgenre of post-apocalyptic road narratives is the ethics of the road narrative as a guideline upon which to rebuild a society. As post-apocalyptic fictions, the works I have studied dismantle ideologies: Eggers’s novel questions the myth of the Frontier and the relationship to one another, to our environment and to our collective past that this myth entails; McCarthy’s and Hillcoat’s works reflect on the end of the grand narratives of capitalism and neoliberalism structuring the myth of American society. But as road narratives, they must continue to tell stories of travel and mobility; they must propose another form of human society that allows people to move from one place to another, to meet each other, to recount their past and to imagine their future. The hope for another society resides in children: they are “warrants” that stories will continue to be told and that these stories are the core of human society.