ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 offers readings of two contemporary novels by American writers, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against Tomorrow (2013) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). This chapter revisits the theme of ‘death-facing ecology’ by focusing particularly on the discursive aspect of death-facing. Jacque Derrida’s work in Aporias (1997) is applied as a means to consider death’s function as an aporia, and the way this produces paradox. The chapter discusses the way death emits discourse and how this contributes to today’s impasse in the face of an environmental crisis, as defined through readings of the two novels.
