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The road cormac mccarthy theme essay
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Pushed to the Breaking Point
Imagine a world where everything is black and covered in layers of ash, where dead bodies are scattered throughout the streets and food is scarce. When earth, once green and alive, turns dark and deadly. A story about a man, his son and their will to survive. Within the novel Cormac McCarthy shows how people turn to animalistic and hasty characteristics during a post-apocalyptic time. Their need to survive tops all other circumstances, no matter the consequences. The hardships they face will forever be imprinted in their mind. In the novel, The Road, author Cormac McCarthy utilizes morbid diction and visual imagery to portray a desperate tone when discussing the loss of humanity, proving that desperate times can lead a person to act in careless ways.
McCarthy uses morbid diction to display a desperate tone about humanity to prove desolation can cause one to act in horrendous ways. In the novel the man and the boy had seen the smoke rising from the
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McCarthy is trying to show that during desperate times there is a sudden loss in humanity due to the uneasiness and the drastic measures one will take in order to survive. A person will do anything it takes to survive in desperate and desolate worlds. McCarthy is proving this with his diction and choice of imagery. A man and a boy set out to survive in a tragic and dangerous world, where the main food source is depleting and all resources are deteriorating. A novel about what is left of a man’s family and how they struggle to survive. Humanity is tested and shows just how extreme ones actions can be. The want for life is tested, one could question whether or not survival will be possible for the man and the
Readers develop a compassionate emotion toward the characters, although the characters are detached and impersonal, due to the tone of The Road. The characters are unidentified, generalizing the experience and making it relatable – meaning similar instances can happen to anyone, not just the characters in the novel. McCarthy combined the brutality of the post-apocalyptic world with tender love between father and son through tone.
Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, is set sometime in the future after a global disaster in which tells a story of a nameless boy and father who both travel along a highway that stretches to the East coast. This post-apocalyptic novel shows the exposes of terrifying events such as cannibalism, starvation, and not surviving portraying the powerful act of the man protecting his son from all the events in which depicts Cormac McCarthy’s powerful theme of one person sacrificing or doing anything humanly possible for the one they love which generates the power of love.
... middle of paper ... ... When people today hear McCarthy’s name, most automatically think ‘liar, he was crazy, he ruined peoples lives.’ Some people, however, would say that ‘yes, he may have been wrong on most of his points, but he knew what was happening and he had been desperately trying to warn the people about Communism.’
Imagine being alone in a dark and gloomy world, trying to survive in a place with no food, no shelter and cannibals waiting for you to cross their paths. Cormac McCarthy confronts these fears in his novel, The Road. Released in September 26, 2006, this novel has been opening reader’s eyes to the reality of survival. An unexplained catastrophe has reduced the world to burnt, sparse land, home to few humans, dogs, and burnt plants. Ash and toxic particles fill the air, never letting the sun fully shine through. The main characters are a man and his young son, who are on a long journey south, trying to escape to warmer weather. They're alone, surviving off the bare minimum the land around them is providing. All of their possessions are pushed ahead of them in a shopping cart with a loose, squeaky wheel. They have enough to get by for a few days and then they must scavenge for more. Groups of cannibals roam the world, taking no pity on anything they come across. As they walk along, the deserted roads, the man keeps one eye on a motorcycle mirror attached to the shopping cart, so they are not attacked from behind. The only form of protection they have is a pistol, loaded with a few bullets. Every day is similar; wake up, eat a little food, pack the cart, look at the map and then start walking. In the middle of the book they run into a group of cannibals and the father is tested when his son is captured by one of them. The father and son go for days without food and very little water. One day they come upon an old farm. Here they find an underground shelter filled with food, water, and beds. They can’t believe their luck and fill their shopping cart to the brim. They stay for a couple of days, but then leave to try to make it to warmer ...
The Road, a post-apocalyptic, survival skills fiction book written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006 is part of the Oprah Winfrey book club. During an interview with Oprah, McCarthy answered questions about The Road that he had never been asked before because pervious to the interview he had never been interviewed. Oprah asked what inspired the heart breaking book; it turns out that McCarthy wrote the book after taking a vacation with his son John. While on the vacation he imagined the world fifty years later and seen fire in the distant hills. After the book was finished, McCarthy dedicated it to his son, John. Throughout the book McCarthy included things that he knows he and his son would do and conversations that he thinks they may have had. (Cormac). Some question if the book is worth reading for college course writing classes because of the amount of common writing “rule breaks”. After reading and doing assignments to go along with The Road, I strongly believe that the novel should be required for more college courses such as Writing and Rhetoric II. McCarthy wrote the book in a way to force readers to get out of their comfort zones; the book has a great storyline; so doing the assignments are fairly easy, and embedded in the book are several brilliant survival tactics.
By focusing on macro-level regenerative violence, McCarthy embraces Paul Valery’s thesis. This theory of the Assumed Infinity can be conceptualized through the concept of the trend versus momentary fluctuations, and the importance of each] in its own right. Specific moments in life are where there are bursts of adrenaline, feelings of emotion, etc, and are short and are encapsulated in a moment. Trends ignore all of the miniscule bumps along the road, no matter their importance, and rather focus on the form and the end goal of the pattern. Paul Valery states that in compliance with this theory and in thriving for unattainable perfection, he “fashioned for myself a poetry void of hope, a poetry that had no other purpose and almost no other law than to establish for me a way of living with myself, for a part of my days. I set no term to it, and I imposed conditions enough to provide matter for labor without end.” In Valery’s mind, the path towards perfection began with no hope and focused on the bare minimum of laws. Essentially, a destruction of all the unnecessary parts of the world, and focusing only on the bare necessities. This poetry which Valery describes is the beginning of his work, which he describes as “matter for labor without end.” The concept of working with no end is an embrace of the concept of
In Cormac McCarthy’s Sci-Fi novel, “The Road”, two mysterious people, a father and his curious son, contact survival of the fittest during tragic apocalyptic times. With a shopping cart of food and supplies, they excavate into the remains of tattered houses, torn buildings and other sheltering places, while averting from troublesome communes. In the duration of the novel, they’re plagued with sickness that temporarily unable them to proceed onward. Due to the inopportune events occurring before the apocalypse, the wife of the son and father committed suicide due to these anonymous survivors lurking the remains of earth. The last people on earth could be the ‘bad guys’ as the young boy describes them. In page 47, the wife reacted to this, stating, “Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They'll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won't face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen. But I can't.”
“McCarthy challenges this “liberalism of neutrality” by stripping away all the established political systems and contexts, and leaving us with hunger as the only infrastructure available to the man and the boy on the road they travel.” p.79
McCarthy’s use of biblical allusions help to create a setting in which all the characters have more complex parts to play than what it seems like at first glance. The allusions also create the tone, which is somber, and almost dream like. The protagonist had his “palms up” while sleeping, which could mean that he fell asleep as he was praying, or in other words pleading. Yet when he woke up “it was still dark”, this creates a hopeless ton because even after all of the begging, the world he woke up to was a dark one. When the wolf dies, the protagonist imagines her “running in the mountains” with different
And in the interview, when the host Winfrey asks a question about “where did this apocalyptic dream come from?” And McCarthy responded to her by mentioning his son John, and McCarthy says about one night, he checked in a hotel with his son John, and John fell to sleep. He felt this town is nothing moving, but he could hear the trains going through. And he came up an image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years, then he thought a lot about his son John, and 4 years later, he finished the novel “The Road.” In the late of the interview, McCarthy said: My son practically convert to this book and without him, this book would not come
"McCarthy, Cormac (1933-)." Modern American Literature. 5th ed. Vol. 2. Detroit: St. James Press, 1999. 249-251. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 24 Feb. 2012.
"McCarthyism and "The Great Fear" Framing the Climate of Cold War America." Joseph McCarthy as the Epithet of an Era. n. page. Print. Secondary.
McCarthy portrayed the two protagonists as good guys by showing how they refrain from cannibalism. The young boy noticed the other boy’s “gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh”(75). The boy becomes aware of another boy’s teeth with gaps filled with human blood and organs. The young boy now considered the other boy a “bad guy” even at an age of innocence. The little boy then asked his father “We wouldn’t eat anybody, would we? Even if we are starving? The man replied, No. Of course not”(128-129). The young boy then questions his father if they would ever eat anybody in order to survive. After seeing savages along the road killing and eating each other for a source of food. With his father confirming him they wouldn’t do anything un...
The structure and language used is essential in depicting the effect that the need for survival has had upon both The Man and The Boy in The Road. The novel begins in media res, meaning in the middle of things. Because the plot isn’t typically panned out, the reader is left feeling similar to the characters: weary, wondering where the end is, and what is going to happen. McCarthy ensures the language is minimalistic throughout, illustrating the bleak nature of the post-apocalyptic setting and showing the detachment that the characters have from any sort of civilisation. Vivid imagery is important in The Road, to construct a portrait in the reader's mind that is filled with hopelessness, convincing us to accept that daily survival is the only practical option. He employs effective use of indirect discourse marker, so we feel as if we are in the man’s thought. The reader is provided with such intense descriptions of the bleak landscape to offer a feeling of truly seeing the need for survival both The Man and The Boy have. The reader feels no sense of closu...
In the Novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, survival becomes the biggest quest to life. The novel is set to be as a scene of isolation and banishment from people and places. The author uses the hidden woods as a set of isolation for the characters, in which creates the suspense of traveling to an unspecified destination near the shore. Cormac McCarthy creates a novel on the depth of an imaginative journey, which leads to a road of intensity and despair. The journey to move forward in an apocalyptic world transforms both of the main characters father and son tremendously as time progress. In particular, the boys’ isolation takes him from hope to torment, making him become fearful and imaginative. The images indicate that McCarthy’s post apocalyptic novel relies on images, particular verbal choices, and truthful evidence to how isolation affected the son emotionally and physically.