Mark Steven and Julian Murphet's introduction points out that this anthology is primarily a study of The Road's form. They claim that the novel's “mimetic narrative was only ever a precursor to its style” (4). Nonetheless, most of these pieces provide their close readings in the context of Continental philosophy. Moreover, they exhibit an engagement with liberal capitalism that inconveniences the tiresome cliché that form is in opposition to historicity.

Chris Danta addresses the significance of the novel's literal and figural grayness, finding that McCarthy's grayness escapes the cynicism of Samuel Beckett's grayness by virtue of personification. For example, the sun in The Road is like a mother searching for her children, who are lost to her beneath the cloud of gray – inside a world of gray.

Sean Pryor's topic is the importance of McCarthy's prose rhythms. He finds that the sense of the apocalypse informs the sound of McCarthy's diction and syntax. He shows that McCarthy's rhythms are “unusually regular” (32) and “not typical of prose” (40). Ironically, McCarthy's artifice “functions not as resistance to nature, but as compliance” (40). For Pryor, then, McCarthy uses sound to accept the apocalypse – to acquiesce.

Several of the chapters approach The Road as allegory. Contextualizing this novel in Charles Baudelaire's poetics, Grace Hellyer regards The Road as an allegory of melancholia. She argues that the novel's religiosity constructs a half-hearted negation of the wife's suicidal ideation, which undermines this novel's apparent affirmation of the saving remnants from Christianity's gray shroud. According to Mark Steven, The Road is a political allegory that ambivalently and ambiguously problematizes the sketching out of what a new world might look like. He finds that this novel is incapable of drafting a new Lacanian Real. Similarly, Paul Sheehan claims that the quasi-religious apologetics point to political and pragmatic concerns. Like Danta, he finds that Beckett is the ghost in this story. And like Pryor, Sheehan detects a deterministic naturalism – that the apocalyptic ruin of nature is now inevitable. Likewise, Julian Murphet finds that The Road is another depiction of the American “spiritual commonwealth” (112) lost to the pursuit of sacred property by dint of butchering ostensibly sacred animals – a narrative foregrounded in the fiction of McCarthy's primary influences: Herman Melville, Jack London, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.

Similarly, Paul Patton argues that the novel constitutes a naturalistic and Nietzschean subversion of its religious surface. He finds that it thereby affirms philosophical materialism and negates philosophical idealism.

The afterword by Mary Zournazi studies the film version of The Road in terms of the context of its production and consumption: urban homelessness. With their earthly store in a shopping cart, the unwashed father and son in unwashed and ill-fitting habiliments of poverty look like contemporary beggars. Unlike most contributors, she regards the narrative as an affirmation of possibility in the figure of the child as harbinger of new beginnings.

The composite view of The Road that emerges from these pieces is of a postmodern capitulation to the apparent impossibility of resolving the opposition of narrative and form – that the signifier is finally incommensurate with the signified.