Humanity In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

1190 Words3 Pages

Throughout this semester our class has explore the main topics of Humanity, Coming of Age, Personal and Cultural Identity, Love, and Death, by reading multiple short stories and poems. In the book, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, these topics play apart in his story between the eyes of a man and a little boy trying to survive their unfortunate situation. Examining each one of these topics in The Road helps understand the way McCarthy tries to explain the seriousness and meaning behind his view on the nature of humanity in his story. Humanity, Coming of Age and Death are the main topics that will compared with short stories and poems from this semester with the Road, these will show the nature of humanity that McCarthy must express to his readers. The Road had multiple events and situations where the father and the son had to face death, either by seeing dead bodies on their journey, trying to the make the chose to save others from death or trying not to die by the cannibals. Seeing death around them become the new norm in this world for the father and son, “A corpse in a doorway dried to leather,” seeing things like this for the two of them must of the time they did not even react to the sight of death (McCarthy). Later when the father dies at the end of the book, the son has to face death of family member even in this his son takes the death a lot better than the normal human being would in the world due to their circumstances, “When he came back he knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again” (McCarthy). In comparing the death from The Road to stories from class the poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, has some similarities and differences. In both The Road and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” have a story line with a son and a dying father, but there are differences in the way the authors allow the fathers to die and how the sons react to the deaths. In Thomas’s poem, the son is begging his father to fight for his life and not give up, the son is frustrated and angry throughout the poem as he asks his father to “do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Mays). In The Road, the father and son are constantly fighting to live unlike the father in the poem, and seem to have a much better relationship than the son and the father from the

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