Survival In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

In the novel The Road, the author Cormac McCarthy portrayed a man and a boy traveling on a journey to the southern coast in a post apocalyptic world where the civilization is obliterated and the world is covered in ashes and darkness. They faced many obstacles such as starvation, freezing weather and cannibals that hunt down survivors. McCarthy successfully created a dystopian society by depicting a barren landscape, miserable living conditions, and the destruction of humanity.

The author illustrated a barren and lifeless setting where everything is covered in ashes and darkness. First of all, he describe the scene when the man and the boy entered an abandoned town in search of supplies. “The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars

in the streets cakes with ash, everything's covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather” (14). McCarthy’s imagery of the city covered in ashes and dead bodies indicate that the post apocalyptic world is an extremely unpleasant place to live and it doesn’t have any basic human necessities such as food and shelter, which makes it a dystopia. Another example that describes the barren setting is that the man mentions that he can not remember the name of the birds, the colors, and the foods that exist in the word before the disaster occurred. In other words, the animals have long gone extinct, and world becomes colorless because the sky turns into darkness and the land is covered with ashes. Humans forgetting things that they accustomed to before the apocalypse demonstrates that the world became very abnormal. The ashes, the dead corpse, and the abnormality of the landscape proved that the society in The Road is a dystopia.

The survivors of the apocalypse live in a dreadful condition due to the lack of supplies and threat from cannibals, and have no hope for a better life.

On journey to the south, they are desperately in search of food and tried to keep their shoes in good shapes so that they can survive the freezing winter nights. The man and the boy’s endless journey to the southern coast is a sisyphean task because they suffer constantly from starvation and the harsh weather. This shows that their living condition is extremely dreadful. One, night the man recalls a flashback of the conversation that he had with his wife before she commit suicide. The woman claims that they will die sooner or later and she doesn’t want to wait to be killed. “They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I cant. I cant… We used to talk about death, she said. We dont anymore. Why is that? I dont know.It’s because it’s here. There’s nothing left to talk about”(56). The woman’s words shows that the society is a dystopia because survivors are living in a complete hopeless situation in which living mean they will eventually being rape and kill by cannibals. There is no other ways to escape this situation except committing suicide, which many believe to best option because it means less

suffrage.

In conclusion, human misery and lost of hope are both characteristic of a dystopian society

The marauders convert to cannibalism to survive in an environment that lacks resources, which shows a destruction of humanity.

In the beginning of the novel, the narrator describes in a flashback what happened to the survivors after the disaster occurred. “Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it” (53). In the post apocalyptic world, the government dissolved and there is no law enforcement. As a result, the survivors turn from supporting each other on the at the beginning of the journey to mercilessly killing each other to appease their hunger. This represents that they are gradually losing their basic human qualities, including sympathy toward others and the ability to think rationally. Another act of cannibalism in the novel in when the man and the boy witness a group of marauder cooking human baby. At night, the man and the by camped near the wood where the man sees a pregnant women accompanied by a few men entering the woods. In the morning, they found a headless baby being place on a spit over the fire. murdering and eating human being is a crime against humanity because it violate one of the human natural right—the right to life. The marauders are comparable to the migrants in the Donner Party who

hypothetically ate human flesh to survive when they got trapped in the Sierra Nevada on their way to California. Both the survivors and the migrants experience unbearable weather and lack of food supplies, which cause them to eat each other. Donner Party story shows that McCarthy is being very realistic when he wrote about human being losing their humanity and resorting to cannibalism in to survive in extreme conditions. Survivors gradually losing their humanity to survive shows that the world they live in is very dystopic.
Throught the portrayal of an lifeless and barren landscape where the survivors of an unnamed disaster lived in misery and gradually lose their humanity, the author successfully created a dystopia in the novel The Road. The dystopian world in the novel can potentially happens to the Earth in the future. For example a massive nuclear war might kill of large population of human, destroy the cities, and cause the distinction of animal. McCarthy create the dystopian society in the novel to warn the reader what might happen to humans after a disaster turn the world into an dystopia.