Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Post-apocalyptic literature
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
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.”
This book fits into the Science Fiction category since society has collapsed, reaching a total downfall in civilization. Mysteriously, the reasoning for the apocalypse is never hinted throughout the novel. Only the reader is forced to infer the possible It is only written from a first person view to third person, limited with the interactions and surroundings between the lone father and the prying son. As they cooperate in order to find their sources of survival, the two wanderers share their thoughts about other survivors around the world. In different parts of the coast, they’ll soon discover the items or necessary entities that should be of interest or deeply forgotten.
During travels, the two characters, son and father, excavate through homes and buildings filled wi...
... middle of paper ...
...acters, an unidentified apocalypse, and specks of detail, allowing readers to imagine a desolated setting on a blank canvas. Its two main characters, who symbolize the last strength for the human race, are forced onto a road that stretches to the coastal shores. The absent presence of everyday humans, plants, and wildlife generally fits the science fiction genre. Conversations between both father and son are limited to plain words that the child may only comprehend to. As a result, all responses produce disheartening lines of gloom and obscurity, though the child remains innocent during the days of darkness. He is also an icon of hope that the father holds onto, endlessly tending to the child’s living. Overall, this novel presents the terrible apocalypse in the modern times of before, to the aftermath between two characters who will soon meet their fate.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road, is an award-winning novel about an unidentifiable man who is traveling with his son. The protagonists are trapped in a post-apocalyptic world that has been besieged by nothingness and entirely stripped of life, food, and most of all, morality. They travel a treacherous road leading south where they encounter cannibals, burnt bodies, and the ruins of former houses. The world and people around them has turned amoral and unforgiving. For the protagonists, however, morality and goodness still exist. With each day, they are able to maintain faith, hope, and goodness which gives them the motivation to continue their journey. McCarthy's novel shows that even during the worst of times, love and morality will prevail and goodness will be found.
Throughout the novel the feelings the man has for his son are sacred; the man makes great sacrifices for his son to continue to live and have a future in a world that has been devastated and stripped of all humanity. The boy is the only source of light for
Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, is set sometime in the future after a global disaster in which tells a story of a nameless boy and father who both travel along a highway that stretches to the East coast. This post-apocalyptic novel shows the exposes of terrifying events such as cannibalism, starvation, and not surviving portraying the powerful act of the man protecting his son from all the events in which depicts Cormac McCarthy’s powerful theme of one person sacrificing or doing anything humanly possible for the one they love which generates the power of love.
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,
This story contains an almost equal balance of good and evil, though it also raises questions of what is truly good. It blurs the line between good and selfish or thoughtless. Characters’ actions sometimes appear impure, but in the long run, are good.
It is often said that a dog is a man’s best friend. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Crossing, a deep affection and fondness are established between man and animal. In a particular excerpt from the novel, Cormac illustrates the protagonist’s sorrow that was prompted from the wolf’s tragic death. As blood stiffens his trousers, the main character seeks to overcome the cold weather and fatigue with hopes of finding the perfect burial site for the wolf. McCarthy uses detailed descriptions and terminology in his novel, The Crossing, to convey the impact of the wolf’s death on the protagonist, a sad experience incorporated with religious allusions and made unique by the main character’s point of view.
Imagine a devastating event that does not just change the world but alters all aspects of life to the point of being unrecognizable. How does one keep hope alive in a world where everything is either dying or has turned evil? In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, this is the daily struggle that confronts the man and boy. This remarkable story is about a father and son's attempts to survive in a barren landscape, faced with the constant threat of starvation, murder, exposure, and illness; they must continually decipher between good and evil, preserve the goodness of civilization, and find a purpose to continue their journey, especially when the existence of God is questionable. McCarthy's thematic purpose is to show that the qualities that mankind
The story, The Road, begins with an unnamed man and boy in the woods. The story is set in a “post-apocalyptic world,” with the date, time and location unknown. “McCarthy himself imagines the disaster to be a meteor strike, although he claims that "his money is on humans destroying each other before an environmental catastrophe sets in (Cooper);” others say they see the setting as a post nuclear war setting. Throughout the reading, the reader can assume that the story takes place in the United States because the man mentions following the “state roads.” We first see the man and boy in the woods, it is morning time and the man has just risen from his sleep. He checks on the boy and then walks to the road to get his bearings. He thinks it is October but is unsure because he has not kept a calendar in a long time, indicating that the area has been desolate for an extended amount of time. They plan to move South, hoping that the climate will provide for less harsh winters. When he goes back to camp, the boy wakes up and they have breakfast. After they eat, they pack up all their belongings and head along the road. They push a cart with supplies and carry a knapsack with their essential belongings, should they need to abandon the cart and run for safety. They come across an abandoned gas station where the man finds old bottles of oil they can burn in their lamp and a phone where he tries to dial the number to his father’s house but there is no phone service any more. They continue their walk after gathering all they could from the station. They crest a hill and see all the ashen houses and billboards in the city below. They make camp for the night under a rock cliff after it starts to rain. The next morning they walk through the city...
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.
Through many biblical allusions, the father and the son experience the affects of hope. Despite the destroyed world, they come together to survive the post apocalyptic world. The “good guys” bring hope for the future and for the defeat of evil. Promise and prospect will guide the new, hopeful world.
It is a novel based in a post-apocalyptic world that revolves around the lives of a father and his son who are just trying to survive. With everything around them destroyed and stripped of life, the two continue their lives hoping for better days to come. They live in a constant state of fear with everyday being spent constantly moving and scavenging for food, all while trying to remain unnoticed. Living in a world where survival is the only goal, the idea of morality has become non-existent. Cannibalism is a major fear because everyone around them is a potential predator. But in this “Barren, silent, godless” (The Road 4) world, where “the days more gray each one then what had gone before” (The Road 1), the man and his son are able to hold their own. Their sense of morality remains intact and they refuse to resort to the lifestyle that the majority of people around them have chosen. They feel as though certain actions are intrinsically wrong and therefore never justifiable. The man refers to himself and his son as the “good guys” and Erik J. Wielenberg explains that they follow a specific moral code. This code includes the rules: Don’t eat people, Don’t steal, Don’t lie, Keep your promises, Help others, and Never give up. (Wielenberg 4). According to these principles, cannibalism is never justifiable. Although the threat of starvation has caused the society to resort to cannibalism, the man and his son promise one another that regardless of the situation, they will refuse to do it. “We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we? ..No matter what?” The father assures his son by repeating, “No. No, matter what” (The Road
Imagine a world where everything is black and covered in layers of ash, where dead bodies are scattered throughout the streets and food is scarce. When earth, once green and alive, turns dark and deadly. A story about a man, his son and their will to survive. Within the novel Cormac McCarthy shows how people turn to animalistic and hasty characteristics during a post-apocalyptic time. Their need to survive tops all other circumstances, no matter the consequences. The hardships they face will forever be imprinted in their mind. In the novel, The Road, author Cormac McCarthy utilizes morbid diction and visual imagery to portray a desperate tone when discussing the loss of humanity, proving that desperate times can lead a person to act in careless ways.
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 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.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy, is set in a post-apocalyptic United States. A father and his son have survived the event that cause the destruction and death of so many. The two of them follow a road that will lead them to the coast where they hope to find and untouched landscape that they can live in. Through their journey they encounter others that are just trying to stay alive, one’s who will steal, enslave them, or even kill them.