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The road cormac mccarthy essay
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Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptical novel The Road tells the fascinating story of a father and son’s journey for survival. Throughout The Road, McCarthy explores many different themes and issues which help to portray the father and son’s journey. Among these themes included are; ‘good versus evil’, ‘paternal love’, ‘death’ and ‘survival’. The Road is one of McCarthy’s most personal and heart breaking novels with trust playing a significant part as the father and son battle for survival. From the beginning of the novel were are aware of the post-apocalyptical world in which the protagonists travel through, however McCarthy does not give us details of the event which destroyed almost all of life on earth. Two important issues in The Road is …show more content…
Early into The Road the boy asks the man “what would you do if I died?” (McCarthy 9), we are immediately aware of the boy questioning his own mortality but as the journey progresses we can see his transformation from innocence to maturity and this plays a significant role in Cormac McCarthy’s novel. Innocence has played a substantial role in literature with the coming of age theme proving popular in many aspects. The loss of innocence in children and teens is usually seen as a change in their perception of the idyllic world they saw, to becoming aware of the harsh reality of what lay ahead of them. This aspect or theme is an extremely popular technique used by writers and Cormac McCarthy personifies loss of innocence in the boy, the central figure of The Road. Following this unspecified catastrophe which killed almost all civilisation, the boy quickly realises the extent of the danger left on earth and must face the tough reality if he wishes to survive. The boy’s …show more content…
Kevin Kearney writes “there are far fewer children, the token representatives of futurity, on the road than there are marauders. Worse yet, most young life is either used as food or seen as a potential meal”. This sums up life on the road for the protagonists and their struggles. Throughout the novel the boy believes his father’s stories about his previous life and this is a driving force for their survival. However as the journey progresses, the boy begins to question these stories and poignantly states “I always believe you… Yes I do. I have to (McCarthy 157). Like any child, the boy believes almost everything his peers tell him and as he grows older he realises that these are sometimes fabricated stories. This highlights the boy’s transition from innocence to maturity as the journey on the road
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.
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.
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the boy and his father carry the fire within themselves. This image of fire is the true nature of their courage to continue on the road to the unknown.
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,
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
Set in a post-apocalyptic future, The Road describes a father and son’s fight for their lives as they journey the road south for the winter. An unknown catastrophe has plagued the world, leaving hell on Earth for all who inhabit it. Rotting corpses, abandoned homes, and devastated landscapes are an everyday sight. Worst of all, human beings have reverted back to barbarism, leaving humanity and any sense of morals behind. Critics argue that The Road has “no plotline or story arc of character development” (165). Although even though The Road explains nothing, it actually explains everything. In fact, the novel consists of deeper meanings intended for readers to uncover themselves. In particular, the road itself is a major symbolic aspect of the
... to read, there are front of your seat moments, sad, and happy moments that the related topic books don’t have. The DK Handbook doesn’t have a storyline and is nothing but information. Fewer students should complain about reading a novel when the alternative is reading a book full of nothing but information. The Road is worth reading in more than just college classes, maybe high school classes should read it; even more novel reading fans should pick up The Road and try to set it down after fifty pages because it isn’t easy!
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.
This book was very interesting and pleasurable to read, I found myself intimately connecting with the characters. In some ways I found myself walking in “the man’s” shoes, not caring about humanity, and only protecting the one most precious to him (me). In some instances I also sided with “the boy” clinging to the hopes of a brighter world where there is still some purity in civilization. This novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a true masterpiece and I recommend it to anyone looking for a phenomenal read.
“What are our long term goals? he said. what? Our long term goals...What was the answer? I don't know” (pg 160). After continuously reading the same recurring events in the book, walking on the road and scavenging food, this quote really stood out to me because not only is this something I can relate to but it's one of the few moments that the man and the boy communicates in the novel. The lack of dialogue and the book written from the third person doesn't give much information from the character's perspective. However, even so, McCarthy was able to master this distinctive form of writing and still convey the character’s motives and whatnot throughout the text. Anyways, the man seemed perplexed that the boy was even aware of the concept of
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 man died primarily because of being shot in the leg with an arrow, but he also died because of his underlying sickness. The author has a very interesting look on death. Death has been looming above this plot like fog on a river. In the beginning of the novel death was seen as an escape from the toxic world. I found the man’s death to rather anticlimactic. McCarthy could have ended the book with more purpose, but instead the young boy is just passed on to another group of travelers. Even though the boy does grow he does not show much independence. Over the course of the novel the boy has shown sympathy towards almost every other traveler they came across. The boy never truly understands that they cannot afford to help the more unfortunate people because the cost is their own lives. I think McCarthy’s goal was to show how the trip to the coast and his relationship with his father helped the boy grow, but the boy didn’t show much
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.