MEMORY AND DREAM AS NARRATIVE MOTIFS IN CORMAC McCARTHY'S THE ROAD

This article examines memory and dream as recurrent narrative motifs in Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006) and explores their role in constructing the existential hero. Drawing on the theory of the motif developed by A. N. Veselovsky and B. Tomashevsky and on existentialist thought (Camus, Jaspers), I argue that both motifs are profoundly ambivalent. Memory is the only surviving archive of the destroyed world; at the same time, it becomes a burden that pulls the protagonist away from the present. Pleasant dreams act as seductive invitations to surrender, whereas nightmares warn and prepare. Read in this light, the father's deliberate refusal of consoling memories and dreams emerges as the inner dimension of his existential choice. The recurring cave dream, which opens the novel and returns at the father's death, forms a compositional ring through which the symbolic light passes from father to son. The findings show that in The Road memory and dream are not decorative elements but structural components of the hero concept.