The Road by Cormac McCarthy showcases a boy and his father struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world that lacks social order, introducing raw human nature. Decisions made by the characters in McCarthy’s The Road are based around dependence on basic needs such as resources, safety, and companionship. Throughout the book, lack of basic needs often resulted in more primitive behaviors such as cannibalism and violence, while also supporting loyalty, compassion, and love. The Road showcases how the circumstances of the natural world shape human behavior and decisions. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, physiological needs such as food and water are the baseline for survival. Resources are essential, and in this post-apocalyptic world, the scarcity …show more content…
It is shown that from a precultural evolutionary standpoint, humans can behave aggressively in competition for resources, similarly to other species. In The Road, animalistic aggression is showcased often, one example being when someone attempts to abduct the boy to cannibalize him. Cannibalism motivated by hunger displays the violent and desperate aspect of man’s instincts for survival, highlighting the aggression humans can display during times of need. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, love, companionship, and belonging play pivotal roles in our emotional well-being. Humans are social creatures that require interaction with others, especially parental care. Maslow’s hierarchy highlights the importance of friendship and family, which elicits a sense of belonging, even in an empty and bare world similar to the one in The Road. This is shown in the story with the boy’s and the man’s father-son relationship, their support for each other, and when the boy gets adopted into the new
In the novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy illustrates the expressions, settings and the actions by various literary devices and the protagonist’s struggle to survive in the civilization full of darkness and inhumanity. The theme between a father and a son is appearing, giving both the characters the role of protagonist. Survival, hope, humanity, the power of the good and bad, the power of religion can be seen throughout the novel in different writing techniques. He symbolizes the end of the civilization
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
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
he Road, written by Cormac McCarthy was inspired by a trip he took with his young son to El Paso Texas. He was imaging what the town would look like 100 years into the future and he though of “fires on the hill” and then thought about his son's safety. McCarthy admitted to having conversations with his brother about different scenarios for the apocalypse. For example, cannibalism, “when everything is gone, the only thing left to eat is each other.” He made some notes about this vision of his, but
Thesis: “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy uses motifs to create meaning in the novel by working with Memory vs. Past, in doing so creates a confusion with The Man telling The Boy the supposed “Past Memories.” Memory is a double-ended sword The main character wants to remember the past, but when he does, he has trouble focusing on survival.The Boy always asks The Man to tell stories about the past life before what happened and he finally thought after all the times of lying “Maybe he understood for
In The Road by Cormac McCarthy kindness is scarce. This means that individuals are forced to choose how they distribute their kindness and who holds the blame for their retraction of it. Whereas the father utilizes the goodness in the boy to find his destiny to move forward, the boy is able to interact with goodness itself and face the nightmare of their lives wholeheartedly, which pushes him to live. Everyone needs to exchange kindness with others to continue, and they can choose to let this kindness
it’s hard for any child his age to understand the reality of life in certain situations that is why the man consistently attempts to help the boy understand what they are going through and what it is going to take to survive. Although the man in The Road is the one in the story who is mainly making the effort and is in charge of his and the boys survival, ends up passing away. His health degrades as they travel, and by the time they reach the ocean, he is close to death. He repeatedly coughs up blood
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Remembering the Days of Innocence People have often romanticize the past and painted it to be better than it actually is. they look back at times such as the 1960’s with a longing of youth or happy times, with an aura of nostalgia, however they tend to forget the rampant racism that was truly prevalent or lack of women's rights. In literature, authors not only use their environment as well as earlier times to create a story that involves a conflict between preserving
moral. The book The Road by Cormac McCarthy is an apocalyptic story of a journey where a father and his son carefully tread their way across a very treacherous version of our Earth. Throughout their journey, the father and the son see the truth behind the inhumanity of which times of chaos causes. The theme of The Road is closely related to the explanation of John Locke’s, where he explains humans are pure from origin, but human choices in life are what corrupt us in the end. McCarthy incorporates this
“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all” - Dale Carnegie. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the father continues through a multitude of intense situations along with his son, because of his desire and need to survive for his son in a post apocalyptic world.In order for one to survive, a person must be able to have and never relinquish the vigor and hope to withstand daily negative situations and to truly
Lillian Shumaker Professor Tribble English 152 May 8, 2015 The Road Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road, illustrates what life in a post apocalyptic world would resemble after humanity has been eradicated. In this deteriorating world, chaos reigns and death is constant. Without a sovereign state to establish laws and guidelines, individuals must make their own judgments in order to survive, causing a clash between good and evil. According to the Leviathan, morals do not exist in man’s natural state
In the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, chronicles two nameless characters who are surviving in a desolate aftermath of an apocalyptic happening and undergo misery, starvation, and isolation throughout their journey. The unnamed man and his son, the protagonist in the book struggle to live in a terrifying post-apocalyptic world filled with cannibals and marauders. From the start the man has one mystical purpose which is to keep his son alive and what was left of goodness in humanity. He told the
The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy, is about a man and a boy who together endure through the tribulations of the world in its retrogression and deterioration. In The Road, Cormac McCarthy compares dreams that the man has to the reality of the desolate world. He seems to portray how beautiful and happy dreams become haunting and detrimental in the novel. In The Road, Cormac McCarthy describes the world as bleak and lifeless. On page 1, McCarthy describes the barren features of the world. It states
The Road by Cormac McCarthy opens to a desolate landscape with “nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before,” (McCarthy 3). The two main characters, named only as “the man” and “the boy”, struggle to survive in this bleak world, encountering a myriad of trials and tribulations along the way. Although the two main characters do not ponder much about the state of their ecosystem, their relationship is symbolic of the relationship between humanity and the environment
A Journey on the Road The novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy is an interesting story about a boy and his father walking through a dystopian wasteland. The novel is centered around the road, and a never-ending journey along it. Some things in the story worth mentioning are the dynamic between father and son, and how the two interact in this story, which lends itself to the overall theme of the story, which is that the world will move on. Even in our lives, the story says, eventually there will be