Are We the Good Guys? Moral Ambiguity and Survival in McCarthy, Camus, and Saramago
Abstract
This comparative study examines the erosion of ethical certainty under conditions of extreme scarcity and institutional collapse. Focusing on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), and José Saramago’s Blindness (1998), the article argues that these narratives dismantle the moral binary of “good versus evil” by exposing how ethical frameworks fracture when survival becomes the primary imperative. Through close reading informed by existential philosophy, trauma theory, and psychoanalysis, the study traces how protagonists navigate moral compromise when communal reinforcement disappears. Morality in these texts emerges not as a fixed disposition but as a contingent practice, continually tested by deprivation, fear, and the demand of the Other. By following the boy’s question in The Road—“Are we the good guys?”—across all three works, the article demonstrates that moral ambiguity operates not as a stylistic device but as an irreducible existential condition. The study concludes that these novels refuse moral resolution, instead asking readers to inhabit the uncertainty of ethical choice once civilisation’s conventions have burned away.