Thanks for your kind words and consideration, Brandon. I should clarify that in my writing to this point I've been thinking about the novel and I've not seen the movie in several years. I don't know to what extent my thinking above would change were I to discuss the film adaptation; probably very little. I think your suggestion to link trials, disability, and truth are compelling and necessary. In her book The Test Drive, my advisor, Avital Ronell, asks why have tests become so necessary to our contemporary understanding of truth? In part this testing regimen comes as an autoimmune response to the deficiency of the scientism that so frequently gets to act as a neutral medium through which public policy gets enacted. I call it an autoimmune response because as one reflects on the nature of the self and its relationship to the world, construed through the lens of scientism, it becomes clear that selfhood is not a self-sufficient thing. Panic (and a range of other anxiety disorders) motors the pursuit of an infinitely unentangled and ultimately individuated agent. The test reconstitutes these incomplete, insufficient selves. This is a classic trope in the existentialist literature. Hans Castorp, in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, is reconstituted by the spectral x-ray he receives, thereby gaining entry into the special community of the Berghof Sanitorium. Prince Myshkin is made something extrahuman by the holy disease of epilepsy upon viewing Holbein's painting of Christ in the tomb. It is by virtue of their socially-constructed and acceptable disability that these figures have the opportunity to act as moral role models for the reader. Their volition has to be compromised in a manner that doesn't threaten the dominant legal paradigm. In the Confucian milieu the testing regimen is toward something different. Personhood is an achievement of a cohort; we are"who we are" through the performance of the obligations into which we are born. "Who I am" is assessed by my utmost investment into the social conventions of my time and place. Rather than a testing of whether or not I know the Truth, I am tasked with being true to what came before me and acting in a manner that can be trusted by those future generations to come.

Thank you for your encouraging words! I embedded the trailer to the film adaptation primarily because I find the trailer to evoke the atmosphere of the novel. However, I've written the above based on what I encountered in the novel and I concede that the film may not perform the same kind of thought-making. I very much like your question of representing philosophical concepts vs. performing the philosophical concepts. I'm reminded of what John Durham Peters recently pointed out in his latest book, The Marvelous Clouds, that media are matters of craft: there is the crafting of a well wrought novel that careful editing demonstrates, but the novel (or other modes of media) also demonstrates it is a vehicle transporting messages in the same sense as we intend when we call an airplane an aircraft. The novel The Road is spartan. The world in which the story unfolds is a chalky bland one. It is a vehicle for affect, it draws out from the reader a range of angst-laden feelings. This strategy of drawing out from the reader, to my mind is a very Confucian one. Confucius, in the Analects we've received, often tells his disciples different things when asked similar questions. He does so in view of the others so that not only the student currently being counseled has the answer appropriate to his context, but so too the other students are tasked with making appropriate to their own contexts the lesson Confucius demonstrates. Confucius didn't advocate that his students align themselves to an abstract principle represented by his dao, rather he gave his students a heading, a means of charting their own dao. That way-making activity is a self-reflexive one, he reminded to look to familiar examples for guidance, such as archery: if they don't hit their mark, the archers don't move the target, the archers adjusts themselves. That aligning with the thing one aims for is what I took from The Road.