Compare And Contrast The Walking Dead And The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road intensely reflects on the importance of relationships as a survival tactic and the struggle to exist as a good person in an immoral world. The relationship between the father and the boy is heavily amplified as the father tries to give his son an understanding of the world he was born into. The father abandons his retelling of history or the past to his son. He struggles to decide if he wants his son to intellectually understand the world or rather survive in it? Their relationship can be compared and contrasted to Rick and Carl from The Walking Dead; both father/son groups relate to being the “good guys” in the new world. However, Rick has full-on moral discussions with Carl, while the father in The Road tends to

Studies show that “gender disparity came close to disappearing by the 1990s for human characters, with a ration of 0.9 to 1 for child characters and 1.2 for adult characters” (The Guardian). In The Walking Dead, the female characters are not represented as weaklings but rather equal fighters with the male characters. They are never left behind, but instead travel on the missions with the group. As an example, Carol saves the lives of the entire survival group from a cannibalistic group located at “Terminus” by setting the place on fire, making her a female heroine. Michonne is one of the group’s strongest fighters. She is armed with a katana and survived the apocalypse on her own until she found the group. The characters in The Road would be expected to be nothing like the characters in these examples; they are temporary characters with few details given about their lives. In “Undoing Gender,” Judith Butler states, “If gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical.” However, the approach towards women in The Road is in fact automatic and mechanical. The female characters are displayed negatively and are indicated as the lesser gender. It is automatically assumed that they are unimportant due to the lack of them in the novel. Former children’s laureate Anne Fine claims “It’s not only an absence of female characters which is a problem in books, but it’s how the women are represented when they do appear” (The Guardian). Modern post apocalyptic fiction strays away from that and follows the belief that Judith Butler explains in her essay. The minimal amount of female characters along with their negative connotation makes reading The Road difficult for a modern audience. Women are now mostly represented as equals and The Road does not give a fair presentation of the