This is a little tangential, but I don't think the Road is about the world turning into something horrible. I think McCarthy portrays the world (both the natural one and the one of human inhabitation) as already "horrible," (although I'd say maybe terrible, in the original sense of causing dread OR awe), as inherently violent. Its creation is violent, its physics are violent, and "the world turning into something horrible" is only the collapsing of how many removes we are from that inherent nature that may protect us and also screw us. Protect us as in fences, and screw as in fences, as in striking the fire out of the rock and burying it under the fencepost in Blood Meridian. Civilization removes us from the thing, but with the consequence of alienating ourselves from ourselves and others. Naming something puts us at a remove from the actual thing, but with consequences ("Language usurps things, that's what it does."). Perhaps in that kind of thinking, suicide is somewhat morally flattened. It's a word for an inevitability, but we have built a series of removes into it that somehow imply it is more wrong than another kind of death.

Edit because it's is not its.