“The Other Side of the Ditch”. (De)Constructing Environmental Crisis in William Vollmann’s Imperial and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Although in different ways, William Vollmann’s nonfiction book Imperial (2009) and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) engage with current environmental and societal problems. Against the backdrop of their shared, though dissimilar, conceptualization of climate issues, in this paper I aim to investigate how these books depict the US landscape as an on-going site of emergency through an ecocritical approach. As we shall see, these works indicate the fragility of human beings and the anxiety of living in an uncertain world in the aftermath of environmental crisis. While, in these texts, Vollmann and McCarthy use different styles of writing and genres to present the urgent state of environmental problems, they both use the trope of (im)migration as an essential narrative technique that mushrooms into various thematic concerns. In this respect, both books show the consequences of (im)migration, as a result of climate problems.