“The clock stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is the 'Standard'? She said. He didn’t answer the question. He went into the bathroom and threw the light switch, but the power was gone.” This scene is where the apocalyptic event takes place in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 sci-fi novel The Road. During the story, the readers follow a father and a son in an apocalyptic world with harsh conditions like cannibals and burnt-dead nature while they try to survive. The event itself that caused the conditions of this imaginary world is unknown, some may say, even by McCarthy himself. This essay will strive to find an answer to the question: “How should the ambiguity of the apocalyptic …show more content…
According to a blog post on the Santa Fe Institute’s website, McCarthy was a part of the SFI, where he regularly attended mass extinction meetings. After one of these meetings, Cormac “interrogated” Doug Erwin about the Cretaceous mass extinction event. Doug, after constantly being questioned by McCarthy, explained the different effects of the event. He talked about the lingering dust cloud, the spread of impact debris, and the incineration of North American forests. The stance of today’s scientific information is that there is a possibility that it was caused by an asteroid’s impact with a diameter of around 10 kilometers. The above-mentioned dust clouds are mentioned numerous times in the novel. For instance, “The city was mostly burned”. No sign of life, no sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust.” This extract is from the time when the father and the son were walking through a city. Another important part is this quote. “The city was mostly burned.”. Doug also explained to McCarthy the impact of the asteroid on the North American forest. All of them burned to dust. The exact same thing is seen not just here in this city, but almost everywhere in the novel. Everything is burned to a crisp. In addition, if we look at the quote from the book where the actual event takes place, we can read something that would happen if an asteroid hit the Earth. “A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions... He went into the bathroom and threw the light switch on, but the power was gone. At first, just as in the book, a bright light would be seen called “the shooting star effect”. Also, by “low concussions,” McCarthy most likely means impacts or explosions. This is exactly what can be observed when an asteroid hits the Earth’s surface. But why “series of low concussions”? It could be that it was due to the asteroid breaking up into smaller bits while
It’s the year 2028, and the world we used to know as bright and beautiful is no longer thriving with light. A disease similar to the plague broke out and caused great havoc. Although it may seem like forever ago, sickness spread only a few years ago. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is about a man and his son who fortunately survived this sickness; although they made it, the struggle to keep going is tough. Before most of the population became deceased, people went insane. They started to bomb houses, burn down businesses and towns, and destroy the environment. Anyone who had the disease was bad blood. Many saw it as the end of the world, which in many cases was true.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is about a father and son who are surrounded by an apocalyptic world where they are trying to survive. Many of McCarthy’s books are about negative or violent times like Blood Meridian and All The Pretty Horses. McCarthy enjoys writing about the terror in the real world. When writing literature, he avoids using commas and quotation marks.. Many works of literature have a plethora of themes throughout them, in The Road, the theme that sticks out the most is paternal love. The boy is the only thing that stands between the man and death. Aside from that, the father doesn’t kill anyone for food, he only takes the life of people who threaten the boy. Lastly, the man allows the boy have the last of their supplies, food,
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.
Death is something everyone must face at one point or another. For varying reasons, many people are willing to die for a certain cause. Some find that there is no other way out of their dilemma. Other feel so strongly about what they believe is right, that they are more than willing to pay the ultimate price. Moral or ethical dilemmas are pivotal devices used in many literary works. However, the literary characters explored in this essay are so firm in their convictions that they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their own respective beliefs. As readers of these works, we are often so moved by their beliefs that we often side with the characters in their journey. We, as readers, are offered insight on situations that we become deeply
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.
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 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.”
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.
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, follows the journey of a father and a son who are faced with the struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. The two main characters are faced with endeavors that test a core characteristic of their beings: their responsibilities to themselves and to the world around them. This responsibility drives every action between the characters of the novel and manifests in many different ways. Responsibility is shown through three key interactions: the man to the boy, the boy to the man, and the boy to the rest of the world. It is this responsibility that separates McCarthy’s book from those of the same genre.
In the post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, author Cormac McCarthy narrates the life of a man and his son who wearily travel across the “barren, silent, godless” and seemingly never-ending road after an unknown event wipes out the Earth's civilization. As they travel through the desolate land, they constantly brave armed marauders, merciless cannibals, intractable starvation, and other hellish conditions. As they continue on their treacherous journey, the man falls victim to a devastating disease, leaving him and the boy struggling more than ever while traveling the road. Through many of the man’s actions and words in his novel, McCarthy reveals the unfathomable struggles the man faces, further illustrating the theme that parents will do everything
Hailee Freeman Mr. Davis Honors English 10-2 5 March 2024 Life is Indeed a Highway Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a searing post-apocalyptic novel following a broken family, an unnamed man and a young boy, as they make the arduous trek to the Southern coast, desperate to survive, yearning for a haven of safety and warmth. Within the desolate landscape, “stripped [bare]” (181) by a devastating cataclysm, the pair navigates through desolate and “cauterized terrain” (14) in which every step toward the coast is a battle against anguish, starvation, and the ceaseless threat of impending danger; every mile closer to the coast only leaving them “cold and growing colder” (14). As the “filthy and ragged” (273) man and child traverse the increasingly
In his dark post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy chronicles the somber journey of a nameless man and his young child through a broken, harsh world where “the days [are] more gray than what had gone before” (3). Day after day, the father and son, “solitary and dogged” (14), trudge through “ashen scabland[s]” (16) and “the charred ruins of houses” (130), grasping onto the thin sliver of hope that “[they are] not going to die” (94). Each day, they shuffle past ominous “shapes of dried blood. , gray coils of viscera” (90) and walls of “human heads. , dried and caved with.
Through the use of recurring ideas of death, hope and reality, McCarthy conveys that there is no escape; either from the universal destruction caused by the apocalypse or the emotionally destructive effects of dreams. In The Road, dreams reveal the human nature of the characters. McCarthy illustrates the gradual dehumanization of people when life completely changes; he argues that all the terrible things that people could do have already been done, underlining the frailty of our existence. McCarthy ultimately shows us how reliant we are on the past and that we must let go of the past to make way for the future.
Post-apocalyptic times are characterized by tremendous devastation. The atmosphere is often depicted as grim. It is after an apocalypse when all signs of life are extinct. People and animals starve, and predatory groups of savages wander around. In The Road, McCarthy sets such an intolerable atmosphere. However, such tragedies are not punishing to all people.