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the road cormac mccarthy theme essay
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Why do you think McCarthy has chosen not to give his characters names? How do the generic labels of “the man” and “the boy” affect the way you /readers relate to them?
While reading The Road, a novel written by Cormac McCarthy, I was jerked from the warmth, comfort, and safety of my home and thrown into a cold, dark, and desolate world, walking alongside “the man” and “the boy”. McCarthy composes his work so graphically that readers are drawn right into the story. I believe Cormac McCarthy wanted the figures in this book to be universal, so that the reader could imagine him/her self as “the boy” or “the man” at any given moment, and to be able to feel as they do. To do this McCarthy did not designate the characters in his book with names, and because of this, I was able to connect with “the man” and “the boy” on a personal level and envision myself uniting with them in their chilling journey.
As the reader, I was deeply overwhelmed with many mixed emotions such as compassion, sadness, happiness, disgust, remorse, and fear. I have pity for the characters in the book The Road, because “the man” and “the boy” have to pass day to day struggling to survive in a frigid bleak world where food is scarce “They squatted in the road and ate rice and cold beans they’d cooked days ago.” “Already beginning to ferment.”(McCarthy 29). The landscape is blackened, and mankind is almost extinct “The mummied dead everywhere.”(McCarthy 24). As I read on I noticed myself connecting more deeply with the characters. When the boy’s mother takes her own life, I was deeply saddened and my heart broke for “the boy” simply because his mom, someone he cherished and loved so much, had given up on hope and faith and deserted him. I just wan...
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..., I jumped in the bed got as close to my husband as possible and eventually drifted off to sleep.
When I finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I was astonished at how deep I was able to connect with the characters and the fact that this book touched me as deeply as it did. It also made me think what if…? In reality if this were to happen would I have the courage and strength of “the man” and “the boy” or would I be like the mother as McCarthy states it “ …a faithless slut…” (57), who has taken death as a new lover. Over all I personally believe that this novel was absolutely fantastic, even though I had nightmares for a few nights after I had completed the book. This just goes to show what a great writer McCarthy is, he touches his readers so deeply they even dream about his work. I would defiantly pick up this book and read it again just for fun.
And in the interview, when the host Winfrey asks a question about “where did this apocalyptic dream come from?” And McCarthy responded to her by mentioning his son John, and McCarthy says about one night, he checked in a hotel with his son John, and John fell to sleep. He felt this town is nothing moving, but he could hear the trains going through. And he came up an image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years, then he thought a lot about his son John, and 4 years later, he finished the novel “The Road.” In the late of the interview, McCarthy said: My son practically convert to this book and without him, this book would not come
As one can see, Harriet, Dick and Reverend Lewis Merrill, even though they are all minor characters, affect the major characters, such as Johnny and Owen with their identity, or personality. Without these characters, the novel would never be the same. As Alan Rudolph said, “Human identity is the most fragile thing that we have, and it's often only found in moments of truth.”
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.
Imagine a world where everything is black and covered in layers of ash, where dead bodies are scattered throughout the streets and food is scarce. When earth, once green and alive, turns dark and deadly. A story about a man, his son and their will to survive. Within the novel Cormac McCarthy shows how people turn to animalistic and hasty characteristics during a post-apocalyptic time. Their need to survive tops all other circumstances, no matter the consequences. The hardships they face will forever be imprinted in their mind. In the novel, The Road, author Cormac McCarthy utilizes morbid diction and visual imagery to portray a desperate tone when discussing the loss of humanity, proving that desperate times can lead a person to act in careless ways.
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
In Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, the narrator, Sal Paradise offers up to us what seems to be a very optimistic view on life. He is forever singing the praises of how wonderful his adventures will be and his high expectations for the future. To Sal, the novel is defined by youthful exuberance and unabashed optimism for the new experiences that he sets out to find. A deeper look into the novel, as well as a look at some of the critics who have written on it, reveals a much darker side, a more pessimistic and sad aspect that Sal simply fails to realize until the very close of the action. Whether Sal is hopped up on the optimism of jazz music, secure in his belief that he is off to find ‘IT,’ or just excited about the promises of a night out in a new city, he is consistently selling the reader on the positive nature of the situations. To be more honest though, On the Road is a novel in which Sal, and the people with whom he surrounds himself, find themselves steeped into a near constant cycle of enthusiastic optimism for the future, which is then followed by a disparaging pessimism for the situation’s reality. While Sal might note that he desires the freedom and happiness of the open road, Ann Douglas says that "this is the saddest book that I’ve ever read" (Douglas, 9). While Sal attempts to show a exuberant and triumphant story of youthful optimism, critics and the actual events of the novel alike seem to point towards the fact that this same optimism turns the novel into a pessimistic story showing the actualities of life.
While reading the novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy the overall aspect is pessimistic. It is about violence, hardship, death, fear, and the loss of hope. Throughout the book, the two main characters, the man, and boy face up against some of the toughest survival and life lessons. Together they face the woman’s suicide, starvation, the idea of rape, sickness, survival of the apocalypse, and in a sense being hunted like prey by cannibals who also managed to survive the terrifying possibilities that cause Earth to go to chaos. Within the novel, there are hundreds of examples to provide evidence of the pessimistic nature of the novel. Cormac McCarthy who is the author continuously writes in his novel about some of the deepest and darkest situations
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.
Originally, in McCarthy’s The Road, the readers are given a slight insight into the dark and disturbing nature of humans through the decision of characters prior to the unexplained post-apocalyptic event. For instance, the boy’s pregnant mother’s decision to commit suicide and giv...
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road intensely reflects on the importance of relationships as a survival tactic and the struggle to exist as a good person in an immoral world. The relationship between the father and the boy is heavily amplified as the father tries to give his son an understanding of the world he was born into. The father abandons his retelling of history or the past to his son. He struggles to decide if he wants his son to intellectually understand the world or rather survive in it? Their relationship can be compared and contrasted to Rick and Carl from The Walking Dead; both father/son groups relate to being the “good guys” in the new world. However, Rick has full-on moral discussions with Carl, while the father in The Road tends to
These themes and issues relate to how the individual moves into the world. The insecurity of teenagers within the two texts shows how Tom Brennan and nameless boy moves into the world. As teenagers have fear within themselves it can be resulted in the fact that they could be unpopular, have family conflict and feel isolated from the community. Being unpopular is seen in ‘The Final Game’ as the nameless boy does not feel that others appreciate him as he is not part of the popular group whereas Tom Brennan was popular when he lived in Mumbilli and Coghill because people appreciated him for his efforts in football. Family conflict can also affect the way which the individual can feel a sense of fear as they want to get away from the situation but they cannot because the family is stopping them, this is evident in ‘The Final Game’ where the young boy wants to leave the country for the city as he feels that he wants to move into the world and go to university and became the sports teacher which his teachers had encouraged him to. The themes and issues which are highlighted in the two texts include; drink driving and the insecurity of teenagers which includes fear, unpopular and family conflict, these themes and issues is what shapes the individual and how they move into the
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.
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.
Cormac McCarthy manifests his novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic world on the east coast of the once famous America. The novel tells the simple tale of a man and a boy who must journey forward to find a way to survive in the wastelands. However, when analyzed with the techniques shown in Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, The Road’s complex structure in unveiled. The once simple journey transforms into a quest filled with exploitive vampires and meaningful conversations with food. The novel explores the depths of heart and strengthens the end with the parallel of the return of Jesus Christ. The concepts complete the novel as a whole and brings an interesting
Throughout the book only Charlie Marlow and Jim Kurtz are given names. This leaves an unattachement from all the other chracters. All the other characters seem to soley be funactional parts in the novel. This personal separation takes out a personal connestion with the other figures. Having no names for anyone else makes it diffult to understand there perspective and where they are coming from, as well as making a bond with the narrator as he tells the story. With people being called