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 …show more content…
McCarthy employs this strange, “spider-thin” (174) man as a powerful symbol for a world with nothing left, absent of hope and reason to endure, to underscore the seemingly hopeless future. The nihilistic, uncaring views of the man showcase the twisted efforts individuals make to survive in a world devoid of light, ultimately opposing the actions of the boy who benevolently “feeds [the man] like a vulture broken in the road” (163). To further his ongoing theme, McCarthy wields this divine image of an innocent child helping the withering old man as a transcendent representation of the light and goodness still possible in the seemingly hopeless world. By fixing the innocent boy as a new hope, a possible savior for their fallen world, McCarthy furthers his motif that in the darkest of circumstances, the human spirit reveals its duality, with one extreme misery-filled, devoid of faith, and the other exhibiting raw kindness in the face of peril, highlighting the blatant contrast between the morals and humanity within each
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.
McCarthy portrays the man as one sacrificing and doing anything humanly possible for the one he loves which is the boy. The type of love that is visible in this novel isn’t found in usual novels. Instead of portraying just a father and son relationship, it also presents a representative of a self-sacrifice and companionship. Even though, both the father and the son care dearly for the survival of one another, in the first quarter of the novel, the term of euthanasia is suddenly taken into consideration. The father had thoughts of killing his own son, because he said that the truth was that the boy was keeping him alive, “They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart. But he knew that if he were a good father still it might well be as she had said. That the boy was all that stood between him and death” (8). McCarthy creates through diction how important the boy is to the man for the man feels as if the boy is the only reason he alive. . In this novel McCarthy presents through imagery ...
This story contains an almost equal balance of good and evil, though it also raises questions of what is truly good. It blurs the line between good and selfish or thoughtless. Characters’ actions sometimes appear impure, but in the long run, are good.
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,
Sickels, Robert C., and Marc Oxoby. “In Search of a Further Frontier: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey Hunter.Vol. 295. Detroit: Gale, 2011. N.pag. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 May 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.
It is often said that a dog is a man’s best friend. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Crossing, a deep affection and fondness are established between man and animal. In a particular excerpt from the novel, Cormac illustrates the protagonist’s sorrow that was prompted from the wolf’s tragic death. As blood stiffens his trousers, the main character seeks to overcome the cold weather and fatigue with hopes of finding the perfect burial site for the wolf. McCarthy uses detailed descriptions and terminology in his novel, The Crossing, to convey the impact of the wolf’s death on the protagonist, a sad experience incorporated with religious allusions and made unique by the main character’s point of view.
Cormac McCarthy manifests his novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic world on the east coast of the once famous America. The novel tells the simple tale of a man and a boy who must journey forward to find a way to survive in the wastelands. However, when analyzed with the techniques shown in Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, The Road’s complex structure in unveiled. The once simple journey transforms into a quest filled with exploitive vampires and meaningful conversations with food. The novel explores the depths of heart and strengthens the end with the parallel of the return of Jesus Christ. The concepts complete the novel as a whole and brings an interesting
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 ideas of fate, honor, and shame, are common themes in many works of art that shape many aspects of culture and the people in those societies. Both ancient Greek and Japanese cultures were based around ideas of fate, honor, and shame. While not necessarily placing the same emphasis on each of the ideas, their importance is shown in works from each culture. The Greek epic, The Iliad, places an large importance on fate, while placing less emphasis honor and shame, while Chusingura, a Japanese film, displays the opposite, placing a large amount of emphasis on honor and shame, yet little on fate.
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.”
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.
Jack Kerouac's On The Road is the most uniquely American novel of its time. While it has never fared well with academics, On The Road has come to symbolize for many an entire generation of disaffected young Americans. One can focus on numerous issues wh en addressing the novel, but the two primary reasons which make the book uniquely American are its frantic Romantic search for the great American hero (and ecstasy in general), and Kerouac's "Spontaneous Prose" method of writing.
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.