Thesis Defence: Never a Day Too Late: Ethics, Resistance, and the Contradictions of Human and Animal Euthanasia in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Jessica Beaudin, supervised by Dr. Jodey Castricano, will defend their thesis titled “Never a Day Too Late: Ethics, Resistance, and the Contradictions of Human and Animal Euthanasia in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English.

An abstract for Jessica Beaudin’s thesis is included below.

Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in-person defences.

Abstract

This project draws upon representations of both human and Animal euthanasia in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, (2006) to examine euthanasia as a political and ethical phenomenon which is both determined by and reproduces human exceptionalism in the form of the human/Animal divide. Set in the aftermath of an ambiguous and irremediable apocalypse, The Road explores the notion of killing as a kindness, where death is the only way to escape threats of sexual violence, cannibalism, and exposure. This project thus engages McCarthy’s novel at the intersections of literary studies, companion species euthanasia and Canada’s evolving Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program to argue that the idea of a ‘good death’ has been ontologized, such that both humans and Animals are made vulnerable to a form of death that I argue few would knowingly choose for themselves. Oriented by the theoretical tenets of Critical Animal Studies, I argue that human exceptionalism forms the foundation for multiple and contradictory frameworks of euthanasia, as well as their discrepant ethical imperatives. These speciesist imperatives, what I call the commonsense ethics of euthanasia, contradictorily compel us to end the life of a suffering Animal and yet prolong and legislate the life of a suffering human. My reading of The Road is thus twofold: I consider how representations of euthanasia reflect and reproduce the assumptions of human exceptionalism, while also exploring how reading resistantly might carve space to challenge assumptions about death, within and beyond the text. Chapter one serves as terminological and conceptual table-setting, articulating the muddiness of euthanasia across the human/Animal divide, as well as the theoretical and disciplinary orientations of this work. Chapter two situates Animal euthanasia in the context of the philosophical discourse of the question of the animal, connecting the anomalous dog on the road in McCarthy’s novel–and the man’s instinct to euthanize him–with the broader cultural ease and obligation of Animal euthanasia. Such ease emerges from a denial of the experience or awareness of death to Animals–or even of conscious life–and a cultural fixation on suffering as a justification for Animal euthanasia. Chapter three considers how resistance to the forthcoming Medical Assistance in Dying where Mental Disorder is the Sole Underlying Condition program (MAiD MD-SUMC) reflects and reproduces cultural fables regarding human sanctity. Attending to how the novel represents the woman and her desire to die as a failure in her role as a mother and as a human, I connect cultural resistance to the existential autonomy implicit in the logics of MAiD MD-SUMC with the still-taboo notion of desiring death. I argue that the woman’s failure to live for the boy becomes a modus by which the novel critiques the choice to die, a textual resistance in line with broader cultural resistance to Beaudin 4 human death. In so doing, I note that resistance to human death is rooted in the same ideological tenets of human exceptionalism that render Animals always already killable.