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Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is an attempt to go beyond the age-long dichotomy of high literature and low culture. On the one hand, the novel problematizes and subverts the conventions of Apocalyptic genre fiction such as the flat and non-artistic prose, the appeal to exoticism, the conflict between good and evil, the restoration of private order (family value) by pushing the very notion of Apocalypse to the point to which the poetic representation of Apocalyptic world erases any trace of civilization. As a result, the commodity aspect of the spectacle of Apocalypse is effectively transformed into the poetics of Apocalypse as exemplified in the father’s literary language. On the other hand, the very literary tradition represented by the father’s language is also ironized by the novel’s parallel structure in which the futility and closedness of the symbolic world constructed by the father’s melancholic eulogy is constantly invoked by the narrator’s objective and flat description of the dynamics that the boy forms through his encounters with the Apocalyptic world. The parallel structure, in other words, demonstrates the allegorical nature of the father’s symbolic construction, and thus reveals the historical limits of the father’s aesthetics and, by extension, of modernist aesthetics. At the core of this dialectical attempt to sublate the genre convention as well as the modernist aesthetics lies McCarthy’s formal experiment where the dialectics of genre and aesthetics, father’s Faulknerian language and the narrator’s objective description, and the representation of the present and the movement towards history is registered.