In both novels, the main characters are isolated from any form of true civilisation. In Lord of the Flies, the boys find themselves on a desolate island which is devoid of any human life due to a plane crash, whereas in The Road the Man and Boy live in a bleak, destroyed America in which almost the entire population has been wiped out due to an unnamed natural disaster. Because of the lack of resources and essentials, it is inevitable that the main characters have to find means of surviving – in Lord of the Flies; this is mainly through hunting and building shelter and in The Road, the Man and the Boy trek along the barren landscape in search for any remaining food they can find.
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...
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... expected, is the idea that survival can in turn lead to dehumanisation and can act as the stem for savagery. In desperation, characters in both novels have dangerously become more animal than human when considering the lack of resources to stay alive. However both novels can be contrasted when considering the effect that survival has had on the relationships of the main characters – whereas, in general, Golding aims to portray the breakdown of relationships in Lord of the Flies, McCarthy uses this theme in The Road as an opportunity to show the close relationship between father and son, which in turn results in the novel being more touching than it is intense. Both Golding and McCarthy have effectively used language, a balance between emotions and action, and excellent thematic elements to create two novels which remain two of the most respected of the modern age.
“Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for its means that somewhere hope is alive” (Sturgeon). In the novel, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding and the movie, Castaway, directed by Robert Zemeckis, both stories involve a person(s) getting stranded on an island. In both the novel and the movie, a group of boys and an individual demonstrate that over time that fear and the will to survive is the only thing that is driving them to make the decisions they make. They will do things that display savagery and uncivilized behavior in order to beat nature. While some may argue that the urge to gain power is what leads one to make decisions and act upon it, it is clear that fear and the will to survive is what many people act upon
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.
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,
McCarthy wrote the novel in ways that force readers to remove themselves from their comfort zones. He wrote The Road with a lack of punctuation that can make things somewhat confusing for readers. Some critics find that without quotation marks it makes the book hard to follow. But when I read the book I found that after the first fifty pages I understood when the characters were speaking. Finding that I had to pay a little more attention didn’t bother ...
When placed on a deserted island, a group of strangers banded together to try to survive. They decided on a leader, problem-solved, fought off a beast, and formed their own society, even if it was somewhat flawed. This was the situation in the famous TV show, Lost. The Lord of the Flies and Lost are similar in these many different ways, with the exception that the show featured a tribe of adults instead of children. That just proves how difficult it is to maintain order in a society; even the adults struggled with keeping it peaceful and civilized. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding presents a broken society of savage boys fighting one another to suggest that man’s capacity for evil is brought out by the need for power and control.
J.F Clarke said that "The bravest of individuals is the one who obeys his or her conscience". This statement means that the special people, who listen to their conscience, are the bravest because it is not easy to listen and act on what your conscience tells you because many people are afraid of the consequences of doing so. In The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, and Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, the characters truly do show this trait of being brave. I agree with the statement because I know myself that it isn't easy to act on what your conscience tells you. Many times the consequences stop me and also it is very hard to base a decision on pure "instinct".
of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The
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 book Lord of the Flies was William Golding’s first novel he had published, and also his one that is the most well known. It follows the story of a group of British schoolboys whose plane, supposedly carrying them somewhere safe to live during the vaguely mentioned war going on, crashes on the shore of a deserted island. They try to attempt to cope with their situation and govern themselves while they wait to be rescued, but they instead regress to primal instincts and the manner and mentality of humanity’s earliest societies.
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 book Lord of the Flies by William Golding is an exhilarating novel that is full of courage, bravery, and manhood. It is a book that constantly displays the clash between two platoons of savage juveniles mostly between Jack and Ralph who are the main characters of the book. The Kids become stranded on an island with no adults for miles. The youngsters bring their past knowledge from the civilized world to the Island and create a set of rules along with assigned jobs like building shelters or gathering more wood for the fire. As time went on and days past some of the kids including Jack started to veer off the rules path and begin doing there own thing. The transformation of Jack from temperately rebellious to exceptionally
People are privileged to live in an advanced stage of development known as civilization. In a civilization, one’s life is bound by rules that are meant to tame its savage natures. A humans possesses better qualities because the laws that we must follow instill order and stability within society. This observation, made by William Golding, dictates itself as one of the most important themes of Lord of the Flies. The novel demonstrates the great need for civilization ion in life because without it, people revert back to animalistic natures.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a novel that represents a microcosm of society in a tale about children stranded on an island. Of the group of young boys there are two who want to lead for the duration of their stay, Jack and Ralph. Through the opposing characters of Jack and Ralph, Golding reveals the gradual process from democracy to dictatorship from Ralph's democratic election to his lack of law enforcement to Jack's strict rule and his violent law enforcement.
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.
Primarily, the two books display themes of similar nature and its relationship. The boys in Lord of the Flies and the animals from Animal Farm show different perspectives and attitudes to nature that represents their distinct personalities and spiritual tendencies. William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies enumerates the games that its characters play with different intentions. Golding tries to play the life game with the varied human nature of his characters (Wilson 54). Jack and his group have different and crueler ways of “playing” compared to Ralph because he is much more of a laid back character that carry the evil undertones of a possible evil evident. All of the events that the boys consider as games such as hunting, killing, chanting, and dancing are key elements to take down their establishment of the new society on the island. Symbolically speaking, all the games have a deeper meaning behind it in fact, it is not just a game used for entertainment. In the beginning, the boys play the games...