The words of Mahatma Gandhi state; “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean, if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road unfolds the journey of a father/son duo as they struggle to head slowly to the coast, with the difficulty of retaining one’s humanity in a world devoid of meaning. McCarthy uses imagery, narrative structure and pathetic fallacy to lead readers to reflect on the loss of meaning in the world around them.
In the post-apocalyptic world the father and son are in, it is visible that human language is disappearing and breaking down. With very little other human contact apart from each other, their ability to understand and make sense of the
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world they are in, becomes increasingly limited. This relates back to Whorfism, a theory developed by linguist Benjamin Whorf, which suggests that language shapes the way we see the world as well as having our thoughts and behaviour determined by the language. Though a small piece of civilisation is still kept alive with the burning fire the boy carries, a possible symbol for hope, it is the father who is the one seen struggling with the meaning. The world the father and son are in is “shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities”, showing that the world has been reduced down to the basic essentials. Those seen as sophisticated aspects of human civilisation have been destroyed just as “the names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true.” Fundamental realities of human life have clearly lost all meaning. This possibly includes the feeling of love, altruism and more importantly the ability to hope. McCarthy’s use of light and dark imagery suggests to readers that certainly humanity is being shattered. The ideas of which were believed to be true were in fact “more fragile than he would have thought”, too effortlessly lost in what is seen as the new reality. The unique structure of The Road helps to enhance the loss of meaning in the world and a dullness that reflects the lives of the boy and the man.
If readers imagine living in a world, day after day being exactly the same, a world where there is no variance in their surroundings, where no hope lies and no beginning nor an end in sight, they’d understand the world the father and son live in. McCarthy reflects this feeling in the unusual structure of the novel as the absence of chapters and lack of punctuation, create run on sentences: “He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds". Readers are left feeling much the same way as the character’s feeling, worn out, leaving the reader to think about when the end is and what is still yet to happen. The opening section of The Road releases a dark, scary mood which is first seen in the second sentence of the novel where it captures the loneliness of the world the characters live in. It explains the “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before”. As the novel progresses, details of their world are reinforced with the miserable image of their environment. The author describes “The blackness he woke to on those nights [were] sightless and impenetrable...No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees". Though McCarthy refers to the character’s …show more content…
surroundings as being very dark and deadly, this is put in contrast with the father and son’s dreams. With vivid and convincing dreams where "He dreamt of a flowering wood where birds flew before them” McCarthy allows a lot of “life” to be put into these in comparison to their dull descriptive surroundings. Reality seems to be a vision of nihilism, though the dreams seem to have a vision of hope. Which is McCarthy trying to imply in the novel? Pathetic fallacy is a technique well used in The Road.
The surroundings reflect the condition of the man, especially when he is at his weakest. As the weather starts to make a turn for the worse with “howling clouds of ash”, the man becomes sicker and more fragile. His health gets worse and he confesses to his son, “I am going to die…tell me how I am to do that”. All hope for him begins to be lost. The father’s death is foreshadowed in this way and therefore, for readers, it is not much of a shock as his death had been hinted prior to his passing. By using this technique McCarthy portrays a change in mood from the beginning to the end of the novel as weather conditions change throughout the story reflecting the moods of the characters. We are made to think about what is left in the future for the father and son at each stage with the small indications the author gives during the course of the
novel. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road uses a variety of language features to influence readers thoughts on the loss of meaning in a world where retaining one’s humanity is difficult when the world is devoid of meaning. I personally think McCarthy is trying imply a sense of hopefulness throughout the novel, as although the father may have passed away the boy was still rescued by the “good guys”. McCarthy was able to demonstrate the power of human resilience in the face of the universe to seem insignificant. In spite of the human capacity for violence the boy survived as being one of the “good guys” and managed to carry the fire, which may have been the hope within.
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.
Readers develop a compassionate emotion toward the characters, although the characters are detached and impersonal, due to the tone of The Road. The characters are unidentified, generalizing the experience and making it relatable – meaning similar instances can happen to anyone, not just the characters in the novel. McCarthy combined the brutality of the post-apocalyptic world with tender love between father and son through tone.
When the man and boy meet people on the road, the boy has sympathy for them, but his father is more concerned with keeping them both alive. The boy is able to get his father to show kindness to the strangers (McCarthy), however reluctantly the kindness is given. The boy’s main concern is to be a good guy. Being the good guy is one of the major reasons the boy has for continuing down the road with his father. He does not see there is much of a point to life if he is not helping other people. The boy wants to be sure he and his father help people and continue to carry the fire. The boy is the man’s strength and therefore courage, but the man does not know how the boy worries about him how the boy’s will to live depends so much on his
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.
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.
McCarthy uses morbid diction to display a desperate tone about humanity to prove desolation can cause one to act in horrendous ways. In the novel the man and the boy had seen the smoke rising from the
McCarthy wrote the novel in ways that force readers to remove themselves from their comfort zones. He wrote The Road with a lack of punctuation that can make things somewhat confusing for readers. Some critics find that without quotation marks it makes the book hard to follow. But when I read the book I found that after the first fifty pages I understood when the characters were speaking. Finding that I had to pay a little more attention didn’t bother ...
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.
The structure and language used is essential in depicting the effect that the need for survival has had upon both The Man and The Boy in The Road. The novel begins in media res, meaning in the middle of things. Because the plot isn’t typically panned out, the reader is left feeling similar to the characters: weary, wondering where the end is, and what is going to happen. McCarthy ensures the language is minimalistic throughout, illustrating the bleak nature of the post-apocalyptic setting and showing the detachment that the characters have from any sort of civilisation. Vivid imagery is important in The Road, to construct a portrait in the reader's mind that is filled with hopelessness, convincing us to accept that daily survival is the only practical option. He employs effective use of indirect discourse marker, so we feel as if we are in the man’s thought. The reader is provided with such intense descriptions of the bleak landscape to offer a feeling of truly seeing the need for survival both The Man and The Boy have. The reader feels no sense of closu...
I am interested in seeing the two texts from the perspective of contemporary culture in the two countries – the research into what the humanity is going towards, and how it can end. → Could it be that the decline of moral grounds in the contemporary society, consumption-oriented culture opposed to the spiritual development (not necessarily religious) and excessive confidence in human power are leading to the complete destruction of society as we know it?
With the son’s fear amongst the possibility of death being near McCarthy focuses deeply in the father’s frustration as well. “If only my heart were stone” are words McCarthy uses this as a way illustrate the emotional worries the characters had. ( McCarthy pg.11). Overall, the journey of isolation affected the boy just as the man both outward and innerly. The boys’ journey through the road made him weak and without a chance of any hope. McCarthy states, “Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all” (McCarthy pg. 28). The years of journey had got the best of both, where they no longer had much expectation for
Firstly, the narrator gives little detail throughout the whole story. The greatest amount of detail is given in the first paragraph where the narrator describes the weather. This description sets the tone and mood of the events that follow. Giving the impression that a cold, wet, miserable evening was in
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.
Though dreams are usually considered to be pleasant distractions, the man believes that good dreams draw you from reality and keep you from focusing on survival in the real world. The man’s rejection of dreams and refusal to be drawn into a distraction from his impending death exemplifies the futility of trying to escape; McCarthy presents dreams and memories as an inevitable conundrum not to be trusted. The man’s attitude towards dreams is established from the beginning of the novel. When battling with a recurring dream of his “pale bride” the man declares that “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death” (18). To the man, the life he lives in is so horrible that he believes that his dreams, in turn, must...