“Because we carry the fire.” : An Eco-Marxist Reading of Cannibalism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

In his seminal ecocritical volume, Ecocriticism: the New Critical Idiom, Greg Garrard writes the defining ecocritical treatise on ―Apocalypse‖ and its thematic implementation in literature ranging from the Bible to contemporary works of fiction and cautionary nonfiction. While Garrard makes a point of identifying literary apocalypticism as having been traditionally embraced by socially and economically ―embattled‖ groups, there is no denying that apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature have seen a surge in popular appeal over the past decade, as greater proportions of the global population find themselves battling socially and economically abusive hegemonic systems. As Damian Thompson writes: