Abstract：

American writer Cormac McCarthy is known for his dark and violent works, his famous post-apocalyptic novel The Road tells the story of a father and his son who travel across the United States to the south. Using Foucault's spatial theory of heterotopia, this paper aims to focus on the heterogeneous space in the novel, which triggers readers to critically reflect on the reality of civilized space according to McCarthy's picture of the dark possibilities of the future of human civilization. From the perspectives of "Crisis Heterotopia", "Deviation Heterotopia" and "Hallucination Heterotopia", this paper tells the story of the destruction of the living environment, the extinction of human nature, and the lack of hope of escaping to the south respectively, aiming to expose the human being's struggle in the face of the inevitable. This paper aims to expose the vulnerability of human beings in the face of irresistible disasters and the possibility of the collapse of human civilization in an instant.

Key Words：

The Road; heterotopia; post-apocalyptic