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. taut grins and shrunken eyes” (90). “Starved, exhausted, [and] sick with fear” (117), the father and son remorsefully shuffle down a solitary road, the weary and slow …show more content…
As the man and boy rely on their belief in God for a remote spark of hope, McCarthy establishes his underlying message of the immense necessity of religion and faith to brighten the darkest, most devastating circumstances. Starving, exhausted, and desperate after having “no food and little sleep in five days” (105), the man and boy encounter a foreboding “once grand house sited on a rise above the road” (105). With little choice but to scour the house for food and supplies, the father breaks into its “[cold] and damp” (110) bunker and discovers forlorn victims "huddled against the wall" (110), many with “legs gone to the hip” (110). Through the haunting, gruesome imagery of the “[hideous-smelling]” (110) bunker, McCarthy illustrates the hellish, hopeless condition of the broken world, as tragically, numerous legions of cannibals often carve away and consume human …show more content…
When the man and boy enter the bunker, "[swinging a] flame" (110) symbolic of hope and belief in God, the hopeless prisoners sit merely “blinking at the foot of the stairs” (111), metaphorically unable to believe in God and come to Him, because they are devoid of faith, having not seen any light, and thus God himself, since they were forced “down the rough wooden stairs” (110) into the cold, terrible bunker. Through the despair and hopelessness of the tortured captives of the bunker, McCarthy showcases his theme of the importance of religion, as without it, misery and pain prevail. After leaving the menacing mansion and trekking along the grueling road for days, the man and boy courageously decide to venture down similar “rough stairs. leading down into the darkness” (137) of a second
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
Another example is that in the novel there are various burned-out churches along the way “There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with the scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who’d barricaded themselves in the house of God against the heathen.” (p. 63) Why did he choose a church to such a violent description? Maybe it is merely ironic, maybe it symbolizes that no God exist at all of at least that he cannot save them from death. All in all, it is clear how McCarthy is always mixing religious with
In other words, the man's thirst for survival is fueled by the love for his son. While the man may anticipate his own death, he continues to ignore it and lives in order to seek life for the boy. McCarthy portrays the father as not wanting kill the boy preemptively to save him from a society of destruction, rape, murder, and cannibalism unlike the mother who thinks it’s better to go the easy route. To the father, suicide is only an option for the son if he is to be imminently harmed. McCarthy provides the theme of one person sacrificing or doing anything humanly possible for the one they love by depicting an idea of love even in a world of nothing.
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.
The world has died, and society has gone with it. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a father and his son are some of the only survivors left after a deadly cataclysm struck the Earth. Most are dead. The only survivors have lost all of their moral and societal beliefs. It is killed or killed now.
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.
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.”
Throughout the entire book McCarthy subtly shows the issues of trust between the man and the boy. The boy is constantly depending on the man for his guidance and reassurance. With the uncertain circumstances that
“it’s snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single grey flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom” (McCarthy 16). By that quote, it can be interpreted that Christianity has expired as if it were that small snowflake that melted. Squire comments about religion being a snowflake when she states: “The snowflake, as it melts, performs a deconstructive dissolution of our very sense of being, yet it also leaves us, as the boy is left, standing on as ‘witness’ to its demise” (Squire 222). During this post-apocalyptic time, it is difficult for someone to stay true to their religion. It is more about survival and how one will protect themselves and their loved ones, and from then on the commandments will be broken and man will find themselves in a situation that they will not be able to get out of. But there is always that small light that gives people hope that things will be okay. In this book the boy is thought to be “the one” who will live on. Because he is the only one who survives out of his family, as well as what the boy has encountered when he sees death. “Of the three, it is the boy who provides the reader with the most intense, but also the frailest, form of ‘living’ in the face of death’s imminence. Acutely vulnerable, he is painfully
The author uses the literary theory of Deconstruction to show the reader how dark this era really was. McCarthy demonstrates this by using vivid detail during the fights and battles, while staying historically accurate, with the constant presence between good and evil throughout the novel. Works Cited Culler, Jonathan D. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
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.
This book was very interesting and pleasurable to read, I found myself intimately connecting with the characters. In some ways I found myself walking in “the man’s” shoes, not caring about humanity, and only protecting the one most precious to him (me). In some instances I also sided with “the boy” clinging to the hopes of a brighter world where there is still some purity in civilization. This novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a true masterpiece and I recommend it to anyone looking for a phenomenal read.
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in the post-apocalyptic world that the man and the boy live in, dreams begin to take on the form of a new “reality.” As the novel progresses, the man’s dreams, initially memories remnant of his pre-apocalypse life, become “brighter” as the boy’s dreams become darker and nightmarish. Through the use of color and distinct language, McCarthy emphasizes the contrast between reality and dreams. The man’s reliance on bad dreams to keep him tied to the harsh reality alludes to the hopelessness of the situation; he can never truly escape. McCarthy suggests that those who strive for a life that no longer exists are deluded with false hope. Having dreams is a natural human tendency, but in a world that has become so inhumane, the man can’t even afford to retain this element of being human. The loss of the past is a concept that the characters living in this ashen world struggle with, and McCarthy presents memory as a weakness to be exploited.