A Non-Existent God in McCarthy’s The Road
A father and son navigate a slowly dying world of ash to reach the sea. Through the journey on the road to their destination they are confronted by the horrors of a post-apocalyptic world, through which they must navigate. The other people left are animalistic cannibals capable of heinous crimes that are necessary to survive in the new world. Through this nameless father and son duo, Cormick McCarthy weaves The Road into a tale where there is no righteousness for the good, and where chance dictates life. Via the novel, McCarthy illustrates his own disbelief in the inherent good of mankind aw well as the existence of a God to govern and care for humanity.
McCarthy chooses to leave the characters nameless throughout the story. In doing so, he makes the characters symbols for a greater group of people. This is a tactic that authors have done in the past, such as Ralph Ellison in his novel, The Invisible Man. By utilizing this technique, the audience does not see the characters as individuals. McCarthy chooses to leave the characters nameless for a few reasons, one being that this approach still shows the random good interspersed with the bad throughout the ruined planet, although it is difficult to tell who they are. Also, if viewed from a religious perspective, the boy and his father represent Jesus and God. In the Bible, Jesus and God are considered pure among sinners. Put into the perspective of the post-apocalyptic world of McCarthy, though, nobody is able to be able to survive without committing sin, so the next best option is to abide by morals and fair-minded actions. The father and son try to do so even in the most horrific and dire of situations. Being nameless makes sense for ...
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... grateful towards the people who died and fed him than to a God that had not helped he and his father at all. This is a running theme throughout the book—man does all goodness, while God has given up hope on the world. The theme of goodness is magnified in the book, and is valued even greater than love or even religion. Ely states, “There is no God and we are his prophets” (170). In simpler terms, he is saying that God has left the Earth, although he did once exist. All that remains are his prophets—those who still choose to do good though are not rewarded.
Though Cormack McCarthy’s novel, The Road, us a dark, pessimistic take on the inherent evil of humanity, McCarthy leaves the reader with a glimmering beacon of hope. While the rest of the world burns around the mistakes of humanity, there will always be those who still carry the fire. Will you be one of them?
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
McCarthy portrays the man as one sacrificing and doing anything humanly possible for the one he loves which is the boy. The type of love that is visible in this novel isn’t found in usual novels. Instead of portraying just a father and son relationship, it also presents a representative of a self-sacrifice and companionship. Even though, both the father and the son care dearly for the survival of one another, in the first quarter of the novel, the term of euthanasia is suddenly taken into consideration. The father had thoughts of killing his own son, because he said that the truth was that the boy was keeping him alive, “They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart. But he knew that if he were a good father still it might well be as she had said. That the boy was all that stood between him and death” (8). McCarthy creates through diction how important the boy is to the man for the man feels as if the boy is the only reason he alive. . In this novel McCarthy presents through imagery ...
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is about a father and son who are surrounded by an apocalyptic world where they are trying to survive. Many of McCarthy’s books are about negative or violent times like Blood Meridian and All The Pretty Horses. McCarthy enjoys writing about the terror in the real world. When writing literature, he avoids using commas and quotation marks.. Many works of literature have a plethora of themes throughout them, in The Road, the theme that sticks out the most is paternal love. The boy is the only thing that stands between the man and death. Aside from that, the father doesn’t kill anyone for food, he only takes the life of people who threaten the boy. Lastly, the man allows the boy have the last of their supplies, food,
Can someone be two contrasting ideas at once? It seems possible for Cormac McCarthy as through his novella Child of God, he considers this question with the use of the protagonist, Lester Ballard. (). (). Ballard’s animalistic descriptions and amazing feats juxtapose his non-humanness against his super-human capabilities.
The father often uses the phrase “carrying the fire,” to suggest the knowledge the son must inherit from his father in order to one day continue the father's legacy. The father tries to educate his son in goodness, survival, and decency even though all such humanity has been extinguished. His efforts to preserve civilized manners reflect his nurturing and give purpose to his existence. Before the father dies he tells his son that all this fire—warmth, instinct for good, and knowledge—lives inside him: “You have to carry the fire. I don't know how to. Yes, you do. Is the fire real? The fire? Yes, it is. Where is it? I don't know where it is. Yes, you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it” (McCarthy 278-279). The fire has multiple symbolic meanings for the man and the boy. For the man the fire represents the love he has for his son because his son is his reason for continuing. It is also the man’s moral code, his way to refrain from turning evil and committing murder or cannibalism. For the boy the fire symbolizes the kindness he carries even when he has been exposed to evil. Since the boy was born after the catastrophic event, he embodies a sense of purity, an untainted fire within him. Consequently, the son is more naïve and trusting of others than his father. McCarthy's “carrying the fire” functions as a metaphor of knowledge and hope for humanity, the natural instinct to keep going and hope for something better along the
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.
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.
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 didn't act on it until a few years later in 2006, while in Ireland. He started and finished the novel and dedicated it to his son, John Francis McCarthy.
McCarthy’s use of biblical allusions help to create a setting in which all the characters have more complex parts to play than what it seems like at first glance. The allusions also create the tone, which is somber, and almost dream like. The protagonist had his “palms up” while sleeping, which could mean that he fell asleep as he was praying, or in other words pleading. Yet when he woke up “it was still dark”, this creates a hopeless ton because even after all of the begging, the world he woke up to was a dark one. When the wolf dies, the protagonist imagines her “running in the mountains” with different
This book was very interesting and pleasurable to read, I found myself intimately connecting with the characters. In some ways I found myself walking in “the man’s” shoes, not caring about humanity, and only protecting the one most precious to him (me). In some instances I also sided with “the boy” clinging to the hopes of a brighter world where there is still some purity in civilization. This novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a true masterpiece and I recommend it to anyone looking for a phenomenal read.
I have conflicting thought regarding Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. My initial thoughts of the novel were that it was solely built on the complete devastation of two characters lives and the surrounding landscape and their constant search for survival. However after giving it further insight I discovered the underlying messages of the importance of good and bad people in my life, the beauty of the little things in life and constant greed showed by desperate individuals. I believe the novels successes comes from the messages of the significant value of human life and the importance of memories in our lives.
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.
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...
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