Precarious Bodies and Ecologies of Survival: Biopolitical Violence and Slow Environmental Devastation in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower

Abstract

The accelerating convergence of ecological collapse, political instability, and systemic inequality positions contemporary dystopian fiction as a vital site for interrogating survival in the Anthropocene. This comparative study analyses Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower to examine how environmental catastrophe engenders biopolitical regimes that render human bodies differentially precarious and disposable. Synthesising Judith Butler’s ontology of precarity, Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, Giorgio Agamben’s bare life, and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, this paper investigates the reciprocal relationship between environmental devastation and corporeal vulnerability. Methodologically, the study adopts an ecocritical and political literary approach to analyse narrative strategies, spatial imaginaries, representations of violence, and ethical subjectivities. It argues that McCarthy and Butler challenge anthropocentric paradigms by depicting catastrophe not as a singular apocalyptic event, but as an ongoing process of environmental attrition and sovereign abandonment. While McCarthy’s The Road projects catastrophe onto an absolute, post-apocalyptic scale that contracts ethics into an atomised, defensive struggle for survival within a sterile cosmos, Butler’s Parable of the Sower conceptualises collapse as an attritional process of neoliberal decay where shared precarity catalyses Earthseed theology, multi-ethnic defence, and collectivist resilience. By situating these texts within environmental humanities and political philosophy, this study demonstrates that speculative fiction critiques systemic precarity while envisioning alternative ethical horizons grounded in interdependency, ecological responsibility, and radical solidarity.