The Role Of Human Nature In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

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People always like to refer to themselves as “independent”. Independence may seem like a great ideal in modern society, but in a post-apocalyptic world, a sense of dependence is unavoidable. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs help us to understand what people depend on. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, survival of the boy and the man is due to their dependence on their human nature and ability to support one another. 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. …show more content…

(Gilbert pg. 44) The first level are the physiological needs such as food and water. This is one of the man and the boy’s most consistent conflicts. In The Road, basic resources are extremely hard to come by, as seen when the man said, “We have to find something to eat. We have no choice.” (McCarthy pg. 220) To stay alive, a huge emphasis is placed on their dependence in finding those basic needs. Nearly all of the decisions the man and the boy made were related to finding food or conserving food for basic survival. The next level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is safety. Safety is a huge concern in modern society, almost every aspect of life is determined by the level of safety. In the post-apocalyptic world of The Road, safety is seen very little. The man and the boy attempt to be as safe as possible, but in a world with no social order it is basically impossible. Though they did experience very few instances of comfort in safety, they were consistently striving to search for

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