The Road by Cormac Mccarthy is a grim, terrifying story about the future of America. The world is destroyed after an unknown catastrophe. A man and his son, seemingly the only survivors, trek through the barren land searching for food and trying to survive. They find groups of savages along the way and are almost killed numerous times. One of the best ways to look at McCarthy’s work is through a psychoanalytic lense. This type of lense allows readers to look through a window into the author’s mind and discover what they really meant. Author Snezana Djuric puts it this way “Psychoanalytic criticism tells about how a work is formed and about the meaning of that formation” (Djurić 4). Psychoanalysis provides a deeper reasoning underneath the words …show more content…
An article written by Victoria Hoyle addresses the mentality of the man in the novel. There are a few glimpses readers catch that insinuate the man’s longing for something just out of reach. The man needs something, anything, that he can rely and depend on and he knows he won’t find it on earth or with humanity. The man needs a higher power to look to for advice and guidance. At night he stands "Eyes closed, arms soaring", searching for "something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellites" (McCarthy 13). The man sees what has become of the world and what humans have turned into and hopes there is something more than this or above this. However, at some points, it’s admitted about him that “beauty and goodness are things he 'd no longer any way to think about", suggesting that he doesn’t have faith in what he’s looking for. (McCarthy 61) It’s been discussed before that the man in the story could possibly be a Christ figure. He lays himself down to protect the boy time after time. However, it seems to many others that the boy is more comparable to Christ. Throughout the novel, the boy carries a burden with him, the death of his mother. Yet, the boy insists on helping people that have hurt, or meant to hurt, him and his father. For example, the incident with the thief that stole their belongings when they leave their camp on the beach. They find the thief and the man takes all …show more content…
Growing up, everything around him was decaying. Everytime he and his father set out to find food, his father always had the gun out, ready to kill. The father often handed the boy the gun and instructed him how to take his own life if they were to get in trouble. The boy grew up without a mother and now walks the barren, deserted streets littered with the dead with his father, trying not to die themselves. This would be hard to handle for an adult, let alone a child. Readers can understand and see that the boy’s constant state of fear is justified time after
The boy’s mother will take the easy way out for herself so that she won’t have to fight through the pain. By taking her own life, she will leave the boy in the father’s hands. The boy misses his mother everyday
He has endured and overcame many fears and struggles, but during this section, we truly acquire an insight of what the little boy is actually like – his thoughts, his opinions, his personality. Contrary to his surroundings, the little boy is vibrant and almost the only lively thing around. I love him! He is awfully appalled by the “bad guys” and shockingly sympathetic toward dead people. For example, when the father raided a house and found food, the little boy suggested that they should thank them because even though they’re dead or gone, without them, the little boy and father would starve. My heart goes out to him because he is enduring things little boys should never go through, even if this novel is just a fictional
It’s the year 2028, and the world we used to know as bright and beautiful is no longer thriving with light. A disease similar to the plague broke out and caused great havoc. Although it may seem like forever ago, sickness spread only a few years ago. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is about a man and his son who fortunately survived this sickness; although they made it, the struggle to keep going is tough. Before most of the population became deceased, people went insane. They started to bomb houses, burn down businesses and towns, and destroy the environment. Anyone who had the disease was bad blood. Many saw it as the end of the world, which in many cases was true.
Many find reverence and respect for something through death. For some, respect is found for something once feared. In a passage from The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, a man cares for a wolf that has died. The prominent religious motif and the paradox contrasting beauty and terror create a sense of awe that is felt by the narrator as he cares for the wolf.
In The Road McCarthy establishes a post-apocalyptic world in which the majority of population are cannibals. It is established that the public (majority) is hazardous to the two protagonist of the novel. The father and son are forced to kill or be killed. By thrusting the father and son into a world with their actions are predicated by the actions of the public, McCarthy is attempting to illustrate the significant influence one’s environment has on an individual. When the father and son are together in seclusion McCarthy showcases maturity in each of the characters. The conversations they have become more philosophical.
My presentation will be about the depiction and meaning of violence and human nature, in C.M.’s novels.
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 ...
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 story makes the reader wonder, why must parents do this to their children, what kinds of motifs do they have for essentially ruining their child’s life. I believe
In Cormac McCarthy’s Sci-Fi novel, “The Road”, two mysterious people, a father and his curious son, contact survival of the fittest during tragic apocalyptic times. With a shopping cart of food and supplies, they excavate into the remains of tattered houses, torn buildings and other sheltering places, while averting from troublesome communes. In the duration of the novel, they’re plagued with sickness that temporarily unable them to proceed onward. Due to the inopportune events occurring before the apocalypse, the wife of the son and father committed suicide due to these anonymous survivors lurking the remains of earth. The last people on earth could be the ‘bad guys’ as the young boy describes them. In page 47, the wife reacted to this, stating, “Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They'll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won't face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen. But I can't.”
Early in the film , a psychologist is called in to treat the troubled child :and she calmed the mother with a statement to the effect that, “ These things come and go but they are unexplainable”. This juncture of the film is a starting point for one of the central themes of the film which is : how a fragile family unit is besieged by unusual forces both natural and supernatural which breaks and possesses and unites with the morally challenged father while the mother and the child through their innocence, love, and honesty triumph over these forces.
The boy comprehends the severity of the situations he is faced with, such as lack of food or water, and treats his father with the same respect and equality that the man gives him. He insists on sharing his portions with his father when they are uneven, and he remains cautious at all times, even when his father is not. The boy’s fire is fueled by his love for his father, which is shown by the boy’s priority on caring for his father’s wellbeing, just as the man does for him. This love and responsibility, manifesting in the form of self-sacrifice and compassion, lies in direct juxtaposition to the rest of the world, where selfishness and indifference reigns
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...
The fictional life and death of a twelve year old little boy named Robert is vividly articulated in this moving tale by Thomas Wolfe. The reader learns of the boy’s life through four well developed points of view. The reader’s first glimpse into Robert’s character is expressed through a third person narrative. This section takes place on a particularly important afternoon in the boy’s life. The second and third views are memories of the child, through the eyes of his mother and sister. His mother paints the picture of an extraordinary child whom she loved dearly and his sister illustrates the love that the boy had for others. Finally, an account from the narrator is given in the ending. It is in the last section of this work that the narrator attempts to regain his own memories of his lost brother.
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.