In his dark post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy chronicles the somber journey of a nameless man and his young child through a broken, harsh world where “the days [are] more gray than what had gone before” (3). Day after day, the father and son, “solitary and dogged” (14), trudge through “ashen scabland[s]” (16) and “the charred ruins of houses” (130), grasping onto the thin sliver of hope that “[they are] not going to die” (94). Each day, they shuffle past ominous “shapes of dried blood., gray coils of viscera” (90) and walls of “human heads., dried and caved with. taut grins and shrunken eyes” (90). “Starved, exhausted, [and] sick with fear” (117), the father and son remorsefully shuffle down a solitary road, the weary and slow …show more content…
As the man and boy rely on their belief in God for a remote spark of hope, McCarthy establishes his underlying message of the immense necessity of religion and faith to brighten the darkest, most devastating circumstances. Starving, exhausted, and desperate after having “no food and little sleep in five days” (105), the man and boy encounter a foreboding “once grand house sited on a rise above the road” (105). With little choice but to scour the house for food and supplies, the father breaks into its “[cold] and damp” (110) bunker and discovers forlorn victims "huddled against the wall" (110), many with “legs gone to the hip” (110). Through the haunting, gruesome imagery of the “[hideous-smelling]” (110) bunker, McCarthy illustrates the hellish, hopeless condition of the broken world, as tragically, numerous legions of cannibals often carve away and consume human …show more content…
When the man and boy enter the bunker, "[swinging a] flame" (110) symbolic of hope and belief in God, the hopeless prisoners sit merely “blinking at the foot of the stairs” (111), metaphorically unable to believe in God and come to Him, because they are devoid of faith, having not seen any light, and thus God himself, since they were forced “down the rough wooden stairs” (110) into the cold, terrible bunker. Through the despair and hopelessness of the tortured captives of the bunker, McCarthy showcases his theme of the importance of religion, as without it, misery and pain prevail. After leaving the menacing mansion and trekking along the grueling road for days, the man and boy courageously decide to venture down similar “rough stairs. leading down into the darkness” (137) of a second
In the novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy illustrates the expressions, settings and the actions by various literary devices and the protagonist’s struggle to survive in the civilization full of darkness and inhumanity. The theme between a father and a son is appearing, giving both the characters the role of protagonist. Survival, hope, humanity, the power of the good and bad, the power of religion can be seen throughout the novel in different writing techniques. He symbolizes the end of the civilization
The Road, a post-apocalyptic, survival skills fiction book written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006 is part of the Oprah Winfrey book club. During an interview with Oprah, McCarthy answered questions about The Road that he had never been asked before because pervious to the interview he had never been interviewed. Oprah asked what inspired the heart breaking book; it turns out that McCarthy wrote the book after taking a vacation with his son John. While on the vacation he imagined the world
Thesis: “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy uses motifs to create meaning in the novel by working with Memory vs. Past, in doing so creates a confusion with The Man telling The Boy the supposed “Past Memories.” Memory is a double-ended sword The main character wants to remember the past, but when he does, he has trouble focusing on survival.The Boy always asks The Man to tell stories about the past life before what happened and he finally thought after all the times of lying “Maybe he understood for
he Road, written by Cormac McCarthy was inspired by a trip he took with his young son to El Paso Texas. He was imaging what the town would look like 100 years into the future and he though of “fires on the hill” and then thought about his son's safety. McCarthy admitted to having conversations with his brother about different scenarios for the apocalypse. For example, cannibalism, “when everything is gone, the only thing left to eat is each other.” He made some notes about this vision of his, but
it’s hard for any child his age to understand the reality of life in certain situations that is why the man consistently attempts to help the boy understand what they are going through and what it is going to take to survive. Although the man in The Road is the one in the story who is mainly making the effort and is in charge of his and the boys survival, ends up passing away. His health degrades as they travel, and by the time they reach the ocean, he is close to death. He repeatedly coughs up blood
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Remembering the Days of Innocence People have often romanticize the past and painted it to be better than it actually is. they look back at times such as the 1960’s with a longing of youth or happy times, with an aura of nostalgia, however they tend to forget the rampant racism that was truly prevalent or lack of women's rights. In literature, authors not only use their environment as well as earlier times to create a story that involves a conflict between preserving
moral. The book The Road by Cormac McCarthy is an apocalyptic story of a journey where a father and his son carefully tread their way across a very treacherous version of our Earth. Throughout their journey, the father and the son see the truth behind the inhumanity of which times of chaos causes. The theme of The Road is closely related to the explanation of John Locke’s, where he explains humans are pure from origin, but human choices in life are what corrupt us in the end. McCarthy incorporates this
“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all” - Dale Carnegie. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the father continues through a multitude of intense situations along with his son, because of his desire and need to survive for his son in a post apocalyptic world.In order for one to survive, a person must be able to have and never relinquish the vigor and hope to withstand daily negative situations and to truly
switch, but the power was gone.” This scene is where the apocalyptic event takes place in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 sci-fi novel The Road. During the story, the readers follow a father and a son in an apocalyptic world with harsh conditions like cannibals and burnt-dead nature while they try to survive. The event itself that caused the conditions of this imaginary world is unknown, some may say, even by McCarthy himself. This essay will strive to find an answer to the question: “How should the ambiguity
In the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, chronicles two nameless characters who are surviving in a desolate aftermath of an apocalyptic happening and undergo misery, starvation, and isolation throughout their journey. The unnamed man and his son, the protagonist in the book struggle to live in a terrifying post-apocalyptic world filled with cannibals and marauders. From the start the man has one mystical purpose which is to keep his son alive and what was left of goodness in humanity. He told the
Lillian Shumaker Professor Tribble English 152 May 8, 2015 The Road Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road, illustrates what life in a post apocalyptic world would resemble after humanity has been eradicated. In this deteriorating world, chaos reigns and death is constant. Without a sovereign state to establish laws and guidelines, individuals must make their own judgments in order to survive, causing a clash between good and evil. According to the Leviathan, morals do not exist in man’s natural state
The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy, is about a man and a boy who together endure through the tribulations of the world in its retrogression and deterioration. In The Road, Cormac McCarthy compares dreams that the man has to the reality of the desolate world. He seems to portray how beautiful and happy dreams become haunting and detrimental in the novel. In The Road, Cormac McCarthy describes the world as bleak and lifeless. On page 1, McCarthy describes the barren features of the world. It states
The Road by Cormac McCarthy opens to a desolate landscape with “nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before,” (McCarthy 3). The two main characters, named only as “the man” and “the boy”, struggle to survive in this bleak world, encountering a myriad of trials and tribulations along the way. Although the two main characters do not ponder much about the state of their ecosystem, their relationship is symbolic of the relationship between humanity and the environment
In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, a man and his son journey across a post-apocalyptic terrain in search of a place in the south that is more suitable for life. Their travels highlight their struggles and the evils they face in this post-apocalyptic society. For example, the man and the boy must constantly search for food in a dead world that only has a limited amount of food left, and if they stop searching or do not find anything, they will surely die. They must also run from the “bad people”
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. An ecocriticism is is a lens that looks at the relationship between