Literary Techniques Used In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

Cormac McCarthy’s bestseller, The Road, involves a theoretical, post-apocalyptic world. He is able to use literary devices to affect those who read his novel as well as the outcome of his story. He fabricates a clear picture for anyone who chooses to pick up his book. The constant imagery throughout The Road creates a mental picture of this desperate world McCarthy’s characters are forced to survive in.

McCarthy’s setting never varies throughout his entire novel. Every scene is dark, the landscape is always forlorn and destroyed, the endless journey seems to be hopeless, “nights beyond dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before” (3). The author creates a post-apocalyptic world deprived of life, joy and hope.

He has pleasant dreams of the years prior to the catastrophe: “He sat in the back of the rowboat trailing his hand in the cold wake while his uncle bent to the oars... Yellow leaves. They left their shoes on the warm painted boards and dragged the boat up onto the beach and set out the anchor at the end of its rope… The lake dark glass and windowlights coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoke a word. This was the perfect day of his childhood. This was the day to shape the days upon” (13). Because the man is aware of what his world has become, he is now convinced his dreams are nightmares. It reminds him of things lost that he can never regain. His son, however, is young and lacks the memories of the better times. At first, the father is heartbroken that his son will never know how good the past was to him, but toward the end, he realizes that this is the reason his son will survive. Matters can only get better for him because the joys, seemingly extraneous to the man, mean everything to the

The author makes sure to repeat the monotonous journey of the man and his son. But, in the end, the journey is never resolved. McCarthy lingers on his characters’ limitless quest to his very last pages. He had set up his book in the midst of an endless, hopeless world; he decides to keep it that way.The Author gives his readers this clue as the man in the story is dying. The father tells his son, “Keep going south. Do everything the way we did it.” The father knows there is no end to the eternal journey. After he passes away, the little boy “rose and turned and walked back out to the road” (286). There will not be an end to McCarthy’s novel because he set up his ending to have no end. The book itself is titled The Road, corresponding to the lonely trek it is all