Theme Of Morality In The Road

1469 Words3 Pages

The Driving Force of God and Good Morals The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is a novel set in a post-apocalyptic world where the weak die and the strong survive. The novel really focuses on the challenges that this world presents and the motivation one would need to overcome them. The difference in living and dying could be whether or not one has something to believe in and to motivate them with. The Road also contains a very strict code by which the main characters, the man and the boy, live by and judge themselves by. Throughout the novel, the man’s and boy’s belief in God and their good moral values motivates them to continue surviving. There are some philosophers who believe that a tool is something that can be easily thrown away once it’s not useful, like a hammer, but a human being can never be tossed away. Human life is too inestimable and precious to the world to be tossed away like a piece of trash. The moral code that the man and the boy have lived and built upon revolves around a good guy bad guy scenario. The bad guys eat people and the good guys don’t. This is one of the most distinct and obvious reasons, but there are more in the novel. The …show more content…

There are times though, when they go three or four days without eating anything and are on the verge of death. Somehow, they always find food. It could be as simple as walking into a house, opening a cabinet, taking the food out, and then eating it. Once or twice could be viewed as a normal coincidence, but they eventually find a war bunker stocked with anything one could possibly imagine. Perhaps all these “lucky finds” aren’t really lucky finds at all; perhaps a greater being is intervening. The man and boy find a flare gun on a boat and that flare gun later assists in saving their lives(240). These little hints are hints of divinity, and they seem to really only point to the fact that God is watching over the boy and has made him a

Open Document