In all cultures, there are people struggling for survival. Some are starving, some are living in sheer poverty, some are thrown into slavery and some just cannot get their footing; but in all of these situations there seems to be a common theme that presents itself over and over again. Many of these people become so desperate to live they will give up their morals and give in to whatever they can to get by. Occasionally, there is one person stronger than the rest, one able to hold onto their morals, one that would rather die than give in to immorality. However, given certain circumstances; even these people turn to pure barbarianism in order to survive. The Pulitzer Award-Winning novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, details the numerous obstacles a man and his son face, in an attempt for survival, in a post-apocalyptic world. The man, the protagonist in the novel, hesitates to help any random strangers who he and his son encounter along their path. Meanwhile, Jose Saramago’s Nobel Prize-Winning novel, Blindness, deals with a mass epidemic of blindness infecting nearly everyone in an anonymous city. The doctor’s wife, who keeps her sight throughout the novel, can be identified as the protagonist. Her situation of being the only person with sight amongst the blind is both dramatic and yet classic; as it adds depth and interest to the novel. Both works emphasize the fact that the dark side of human nature becomes more pronounced once survival is threatened.
Originally, in McCarthy’s The Road, the readers are given a slight insight into the dark and disturbing nature of humans through the decision of characters prior to the unexplained post-apocalyptic event. For instance, the boy’s pregnant mother’s decision to commit suicide and giv...
... middle of paper ...
...urder. Eventually, once the blind internees escape, these conditions are worsened when the doctor’s wife so audaciously thinks to murder the young boy and the government goes into hiding, not attempting to aid its people in any way whatsoever. However, that being said, although these are fictional novels, one must realize the greater purpose of these prize-winning authors. What McCarthy and Saramago are really trying to imply is that if present-day society does not maintain its balance, the most vicious and savage motivations can emerge from even the best of us.
Works Cited
“Blindness” Kirkus, 2010. Web. 26 May 2013.
“The Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2013. Web. 26 May 2013.
“The Road” Kirkus, 2010. Web. 26 May 2013.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. London: Picador, 2006. Print.
Saramago, Jose. Blindness. Great Britain: Harcourt Publishers Ltd., 1998. Print.
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.
In Night by Elie Wiesel and Welcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow, the reader witnesses the purpose of hope in one’s life. Wiesel and Doctorow fabricate their works around the trials and tribulations one suffers and what causes one to persevere to continue living. Elie and Blue, characters in the works, experience a life full of suffering and destruction. Even through this, they both live on with a purpose unknown to the reader, and perhaps unknown to themselves. Elie and Blue live on, but to no avail it seems, as both authors end their works with an ultimate destruction of the lives of their characters. However, Wiesel and Doctorow express that Elie and Blue persevere through their lives entirely as a result of hope. These authors suggest that suffering will exist in everyone’s life, and amidst this suffering one often searches for meaning. As Elie and Blue demonstrate, hope determines one’s meaning and purpose in life. Wiesel and Doctorow prove that one’s hope defines one’s existence; however, that hope only masks the futility of life, through the presentation of Elie and Blue’s construction of hope, destruction of hope, and adaptation of hope.
The most significant journeys are always the ones that transform us, from which we emerge changed in some way. In Paulo Coelho’s modern classic novel The Alchemist, and Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken, the journey that is undertaken by the central exponents leaves both with enlightening knowledge that alters their lives irrevocably. In stark contradiction to this, Ivan Lalic’s poem Of Eurydice , delves into the disruptive and negative force of knowledge, in contrast to The Alchemist which details an antithesis of this point relative to knowledge. In all journeys, the eventuality of knowledge is a transformative one.
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.
...in other parts of the novel, for example when he shot the man who threatened the boy’s life, those actions were always for the purpose of survival and to protect himself and his son. The pressure of living in a post-apocalyptic setting causes the man to always be in a highly strained emotional state and this is one of the main reasons why he reacted to the thief in such an outrageous manner. This suggests that the man is a product of his environment and so his behaviour is determined by external conditions, implying that the man lacks agency and autonomy to some extent. McCarthy’s representation of the man’s character in this extract encourages the reader to think about whether moral rules, which were established in a normal civilisation, can still exist in a world where all civilisation is destroyed and if they can how will people ensure that they are carried out.
The world Cormac McCarthy wrote about is certainly the grimmest and most decayed place a person may live in, because of the absence of law managements and higher authorities which should guide or oppress the population, and the freedom humanity has at its hands. McCarthy wants to point out the reality that humans should be allowed to exercise their free will, but must not exaggerate, and develops circumstances which display the extent to which people are willing to abuse their independence and unleash their dark side. because the majority of the inhabitants of this planet are willing to resort to other means of survival, which are selfish and immoral, if not for the existence of legislation and order.
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...
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.”
Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road displays different concepts of nuclear and non-nuclear families throughout the novel. In The Road the reader is introduced to different types of individuals and non-nuclear families and how they succeed in a post-apocalyptic world. Nuclear families are what many consider to be a traditional family, consisting of a mother, father, and children while non-nuclear families are families that are considered untraditional. However, when a traditional family is introduced the reader sees the failures of nuclear families rather than their success while non-nuclear families appear to be more likely to succeed in the sense of survival. Incidents
The Road is a phenomenal example of how raw human nature shapes peoples’ decisions. It addresses the behaviors of people neither informed nor controlled by a social order. In the essence of The Road, people’s actions are highly dependent on the person’s basic needs. A lack of basic human needs often results in the more disturbing view of human nature. (Gilbert pg. 43) Betrayal, suicide, and cannibalism are all examples of behaviors that human nature can bring out of people.
Post-Apocalyptic settings used in fictional works have become increasingly popular over the years. The entire bases around post-apocalyptic is how the world as we know it has great changes, therefore altering the lifestyle of all things living. Whether the reasoning be environmental or an epidemic, the already build society is abruptly changed forcing major alterations in how life continues. The ethical code of morals in which we live by is replaced by the instinct to survive when adapting to life in an altered world. Using examples from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, George R. Stewarts Earth Abides, and AMC series The Walking Dead, will demonstrate the transitions made as survival takes precedent over moral practices and how rebuilding civilizations
In the Novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, survival becomes the biggest quest to life. The novel is set to be as a scene of isolation and banishment from people and places. The author uses the hidden woods as a set of isolation for the characters, in which creates the suspense of traveling to an unspecified destination near the shore. Cormac McCarthy creates a novel on the depth of an imaginative journey, which leads to a road of intensity and despair. The journey to move forward in an apocalyptic world transforms both of the main characters father and son tremendously as time progress. In particular, the boys’ isolation takes him from hope to torment, making him become fearful and imaginative. The images indicate that McCarthy’s post apocalyptic novel relies on images, particular verbal choices, and truthful evidence to how isolation affected the son emotionally and physically.
In today’s society, people are more concerned with their own “little world,” rather than looking at the extensive perspective of life. One reason why people can sometimes be classified as being “blind” is because people fear the unknown, and rejects the unfamiliar. Many people are not comfortable with stepping out of their shell and exploring their surroundings, let alone trying to look through the eyes of the segregated minority. In the novel Blindness, Jose Saramago metaphorically uses the word “blindness” as a term meaning, the truth that we cannot bear to see. To avoid the outside world, many people tend to shelter themselves from the obvious reality, and tend to focus of their “own” meaning of reality.
The story of Blindness by José Saramago signifies ignorance that can form in human communities and its harmful effects. This ignorance exhibits itself throughout the story in the fragility of societal organization, such as through the government’s attempt to quarantine the blindness, only to have the entire city succumb to the disease. This shows that the organizations in charge demonstrate ignorance by acting without knowing the full implications of a crisis.
Through the use of recurring ideas of death, hope and reality, McCarthy conveys that there is no escape; either from the universal destruction caused by the apocalypse or the emotionally destructive effects of dreams. In The Road, dreams reveal the human nature of the characters. McCarthy illustrates the gradual dehumanization of people when life completely changes; he argues that all the terrible things that people could do have already been done, underlining the frailty of our existence. McCarthy ultimately shows us how reliant we are on the past and that we must let go of the past to make way for the future.