Nowhere between river and road: a Nagelian reading of Suttree and The Road

My chapter develops a philosophical commentary of the two novels focusing on the issue of the interaction between subjective action/planning and objective givenness of the world. My contribution will be articulated as follows: 1) I argue that death is one of if not the fundamental theme of Suttree and The Road, and I interpret death as the only existential and ontological truth, that is, as the view from “nowhere” or the objectivity replacing every human view from “here” and representation; 2) I develop this point by investigating the relationship between the characters of Suttree and the father in The Road (from now on I will refer to him simply as “the father”) and their environments in terms of a radical anti-humanism in which the endeavour to give a human shape to the world results in utter annihilation, thus showing the nothingness of any subjective standpoint, including basic moral intuition; 3) I discuss the paradox entailed in the impossibility of having a fully objective, anti-humanist view if not through a subjective-human view and point out the necessary incompleteness of both the view from nowhere and the view from here, finally arguing that Suttree and the father embody, in two different forms, the humanly lived awareness of this paradox.