Dreams of Mother Earth

Recently in class we discussed the importance of dreams in the novel and what they mean. The man's dreams often feature his late wife and the absence of nature in the world now. We took this juxtaposition of the mother figure and nature to signify the death of 'Mother Earth' as the world ended in some form of man-made environmental crisis. An example of one of these "rich dreams...which he was loathe to wake from" is the "memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts." (131) Here McCarthy calls attention to the fertility of the woman through the clinging of the gown to her breasts, and the nature that is "no longer known in the world" through mentioning the lawn. (131) In this way he shows the relationship between two things that no longer exist in the story: the woman and nature. This point can be expanded in the way there are virtually no women in the novel. The mother of the boy is mentioned only in flashbacks, dreams, or memories and every other traveler that the protagonists encounter is male. The only female survivor that the man and his son see is the pregnant woman traveling with two men. When the boy and the man go to their campsite they see a human infant on a spit over a fire. Once again McCarthy highlights man's exploitation of the earth and her resources, as one can assume that the two men traveling with the pregnant woman have just been using her to reap her fruits (eat her children) in order to stay alive without thought to the consequences.