Cormac Mccarthy The Road Analysis

Eric Burdon once said, “Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil. It's a constant struggle as to which one will win. And one cannot exist without the other”. Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, illustrates a recurring motif of Good vs. Evil in a charred post-apocalyptic universe. This new world that is scorched of life contains the father and son duo who go one each day with Good and Evil lurking behind. The father and son, for most of the novel, are the good side of the spectrum but even the good in people parts away when the stress of living one more day is constantly knocking on the front door. McCarthy’s larger purpose in writing The Road is to show how Good and Evil coincide with each other while facing identical circumstances.

Here is the conflict between father and son against the man from the diesel truck. In this part of the novel the man and his son encounter a man that parted from his group with the diesel truck. Here the man from the truck lunges at the boy and

When the thief took their cart he took away their food, shelter, clothing and everything else that ensured them to live another day. When the father and son finally catch up to the thief the son says, “Papa please don’t kill the man. The thief’s eyes swung widely” (256). The father in this section could be depicted as evil do to the fact that he is trying to kill the man that almost killed him. While the thief was heart shaken he said, “Come on man. I done what you said. Listen to the boy. Take your clothes off” (256). The father is forcing the thief to take his clothes off which means that death was in his near future which is what the thief may have caused when he took the cart. All in all, the father is evil in this section because he tried to reverse what would have happened to them if they didn’t have the cart upon the thief which would have been