ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the philosophical experiment performed by the Cormac McCarthy's man— by persisting in thinking, in seeing— in The Road in its native context: the question of the reach and limitations of experience-of thinking as seeing-in relation to transcendence, whether divinity or nothingness, or perhaps both. Bereft of a way of thinking about things, one might stop thinking, one might re-think thinking, or one might turn to thinking about nothing. Whichever direction one chooses to pursue, one must inevitably face the prospect of either existing without thinking, of thinking about something else, or of thinking in some other way. The film's brief opening glimpses of idyllic rural life prior to the catastrophe quickly give way to its first depictions of devastation. The 'view' stretching before the man's eyes hemorrhages order, integrity, form, light, the very conditions of the possibility of perception. Faced with their imminent demise, the man must inevitably confront the increasingly real possibility of seeing nothing.
