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Literary devices on a road not taken
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First Page The first page of the book the road written by Cormac McCarthy used many narrative techniques. McCarthy wrote the novel in 3 rd person making it less bias, but more mysterious as nothing is revealed in the description of the 2 characters mentioned. The sentence structure is long and describing the location with no dialogue shown. The location was described, but no specifics, no names of the location all that was known is it is in the woods. Two characters are introduced, but not described one presumably a male adult and another a child. This technique McCarthy uses keeps the audience in extreme suspense as no information has been revealed and encourages the reader to keep reading if they want to know more. Why I compared The
Road To Shawshank The novel I choose to compare Shawshank redemption with is the road. I chose it as both protagonists have to go through extreme struggles and have to persevere in challenges most people would give up on. Although there challenges are very different there emotions are the same as well as their relentless perseverance in achieving their goals. They share a similar goal survival Andy in a prison environment and The father on the road is in a post-apocalyptic world. What Can You Tell About The Protagonist In The Road At the current stage not much has been revealed about the protagonist except for his child. It is apparent his child is his life saying “if you died, I would die to” as he couldn’t bear living without him. Besides some emotion, Cormac makes this like everything else a mystery even his name and a description of him has all been withheld from the reader. Setting Of The Road The setting appears to be in a post-apocalyptic world. No locations are used except the road that lead from the forest and once they have entered to the road so far they have not left it. In relation to the title, it is safe to assume the road they are on is constant throughout the book. Certain territories have been mentioned such as the blood cults that control areas and marauders who patrol certain sections. Cormac again withholds all in-depth information creating deep anticipation. Later on when they reach the coast the ocean is described in more detail as he tries to explain to the kid what the ocean use to be like compared to now.
In Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road, the two main characters struggle to keep moving forward. Their motivation to push onward is found in the bottom levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; which are physiological, safety, and emotional. Each of the levels are equally important in order for the man to reach self-actualization. In order to reach the top level, however, the man must fulfill the bottom levels first.
Typically, a novel contains four basic parts: a beginning, middle, climax, and the end. The beginning sets the tone for the book and introduces the reader to the characters and the setting. The majority of the novel comes from middle where the plot takes place. The plot is what usually captures the reader’s attention and allows the reader to become mentally involved. Next, is the climax of the story. This is the point in the book where everything comes together and the reader’s attention is at the fullest. Finally, there is the end. In the end of a book, the reader is typically left asking no questions, and satisfied with the outcome of the previous events. However, in the novel The Things They Carried the setup of the book is quite different. This book is written in a genre of literature called “metafiction.” “Metafiction” is a term given to fictional story in which the author makes the reader question what is fiction and what is reality. This is very important in the setup of the Tim’s writing because it forces the reader to draw his or her own conclusion about the story. However, this is not one story at all; instead, O’Brien writes the book as if each chapter were its own short story. Although all the chapters have relation to one another, when reading the book, the reader is compelled to keep reading. It is almost as if the reader is listening to a “soldier storyteller” over a long period of time.
McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York, New York: Vintage Books. 2011.
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.
Richard Connells “The Most Dangerous Game” is a short story which illustrates that calm analytical thinking can increase your odds of survival and controlling panic.
This "chaos" is also created through the use of frame- a story within a story. Towards the conclusion of the novel, the corners of the story are pulled together and readers are able to close the frame that encapsulated the inner story. The car ride is the result of Ondaatje's ability to transcend time and space- the story ends at the beginning of the novel and begins at the end, as if Patrick has told his story not only to the young girl Hana, but ultimately, to readers.
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 story, The Road, begins with an unnamed man and boy in the woods. The story is set in a “post-apocalyptic world,” with the date, time and location unknown. “McCarthy himself imagines the disaster to be a meteor strike, although he claims that "his money is on humans destroying each other before an environmental catastrophe sets in (Cooper);” others say they see the setting as a post nuclear war setting. Throughout the reading, the reader can assume that the story takes place in the United States because the man mentions following the “state roads.” We first see the man and boy in the woods, it is morning time and the man has just risen from his sleep. He checks on the boy and then walks to the road to get his bearings. He thinks it is October but is unsure because he has not kept a calendar in a long time, indicating that the area has been desolate for an extended amount of time. They plan to move South, hoping that the climate will provide for less harsh winters. When he goes back to camp, the boy wakes up and they have breakfast. After they eat, they pack up all their belongings and head along the road. They push a cart with supplies and carry a knapsack with their essential belongings, should they need to abandon the cart and run for safety. They come across an abandoned gas station where the man finds old bottles of oil they can burn in their lamp and a phone where he tries to dial the number to his father’s house but there is no phone service any more. They continue their walk after gathering all they could from the station. They crest a hill and see all the ashen houses and billboards in the city below. They make camp for the night under a rock cliff after it starts to rain. The next morning they walk through the city...
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.
While reading the novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy the overall aspect is pessimistic. It is about violence, hardship, death, fear, and the loss of hope. Throughout the book, the two main characters, the man, and boy face up against some of the toughest survival and life lessons. Together they face the woman’s suicide, starvation, the idea of rape, sickness, survival of the apocalypse, and in a sense being hunted like prey by cannibals who also managed to survive the terrifying possibilities that cause Earth to go to chaos. Within the novel, there are hundreds of examples to provide evidence of the pessimistic nature of the novel. Cormac McCarthy who is the author continuously writes in his novel about some of the deepest and darkest situations
Losing a phone compared to being raped, starved, killed, and eaten in pieces makes everyday life seem not so excruciating. Cormac McCarthy was born July 20, 1933 and is one of the most influencing writers of this era. McCarthy was once so poor he could not even afford toothpaste. Of course this was before he became famous. His lifestyle was hotel to hotel. One time he got thrown out of a $40 dollar a month hotel and even became homeless. This is a man who from experience knows what should be appreciated. McCarthy published a novel that would give readers just that message called The Road. Placed in a world of poverty the story is about a man and his son. They travel to a warmer place in hopes of finding something more than the scattered decomposing bodies and ashes. The father and son face hunger, death, and distrust on their long journey. 15 year old Lawrence King was shot for being gay. Known as a common hate crime, the murderer obviously thought he was more superior to keep his life and to take someone’s life. Believing ideas in a possible accepting world with no conditions is dangerous thought to that person’s immunity to the facts of reality.
People always like to refer to themselves as “independent”. Independence may seem like a great ideal in modern society, but in a post-apocalyptic world, a sense of dependence is unavoidable. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs help us to understand what people depend on. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, survival of the boy and the man is due to their dependence on their human nature and ability to support one another.
For centuries, people have been arguing over what makes someone who they are. Is it just human nature or is it nurture? In The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, a father and his son are living in a world where society has collapsed, and the lack of a structured society sets up the perfect experiment to test whether nature or nurture shapes the personality of a person. Throughout the book, the father tells his son stories that contain morals, encourages his son to carry the fire, and talks to his son about ethics. These interactions between father and son show that McCarthy believes that nurture wins in the common argument of nature versus nurture.
Part two of Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road, gives the reader, for the first time, a close look at the character Dean Moriarty. This section of the novel begins when Dean, his ex-wife Marylou, and his friend Ed, meet up with his closer friend, Sal, at Sal's brother's house in Virginia. Sal had not seen Dean for over a year when they suddenly show up on the doorstep. Sal sums up their tale by saying, "So now Dean had come about four thousand miles from Frisco, via Arizona and up to Denver, inside four days, with innumerable adventures sandwiched in, and it was only the beginning" (117). Dean is an individual who has a very enthusiastic and optimistic outlook on life. But attached to his excitement for life is a kind of madness. He is constantly on the go; he is always mapping out his next adventure, so as to not miss out on any excitement. He seems to be obsessed with the idea of time: he fears wasting the little time he has in the world. The way in which the word "time" is emphasized in this novel illustrates how Dean Moriarty is overwhelmed with the sense of living for the day.
The narrator looks down one road until he cannot see beyond the bend in the road as it goes into the woods.