Desperate Times in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

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A father and a son survives a cataclysmic event; the destruction of the world. They become homeless scavengers, hunting for food, looking for shelter, and following the one and only road to the coast where there might be a sign of hope. Cormac McCarthy tells us a post-apocalyptic epic. This breathtaking novel is a love story of a father and a son, which also depicts the human nature and how people can react in desperate times.

The world is covered in ash. Even the sea turned grey. It’s a dull, freezing, bleak, ashen-skied wasteland in which human beings are trying to survive. Destroyed cities and devastated countryside that is totally burned out is virtually uninhabited. The cause of this devastation is never explained. Two kinds of people exist in this world; normal human beings who don’t eat humans and mad and frantic human carnivores that eat anything that is edible from little kids to dead animals and humans. The two main characters, a man and a boy; father and son call themselves ‘the good guys,’ who ‘carry the fire.’ They don’t trust anyone but each other for there is no one ...

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