The Road is a novel written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006. It features a man and his son struggling to survive after the world has ended, due to some undisclosed natural disaster, and after his wife committed suicide. After a long journey toward the Southern coast of what used to be America, which featured many days of starvation and often violent encounters with other survivors, the father succumbs to his injuries and his undisclosed illness, leaving the son to struggle on his own. The son is found by a family of good people who decided to care for him in the absence of his father and the book ends here. In The Road, violence occurs in several different ways including, cannibalism, murder, thievery, rape and so forth. Some of those …show more content…
Although the man was a “good guy” he still engaged in quite a bit of violence throughout the novel. While walking in woods, the man and his son encounter a group of “roadrats” or people of the road who murder and steal from people. The man shot and killed one of the “roadrats” who held a knife to his son’s neck (McCarthy, 66). At one point in the novel, he was attacked by a random man, who he then shot He also shot and killed a random man in a building with a flare gun after that same man shot him in the leg with an arrow (McCarthy, 263). One last example of violence the man committed was when he caught the “bad guy” who stole all of their belongings on the beach. Instead of just taking his items back from the thief, the man takes everything from the man including the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet, threating the entire time, “I’ll kill you where you stand” (McCarthy, 256). The man’s acts of violence are justified. In almost every instance the man is either protecting his son and himself or in a situation where self-defense is necessary. One can believe that any father would do anything to protect his child, especially in the world they live in now. The man even makes it a point to tell his son, “I will kill anyone that touches you”, proving he is willing to anything possible, including murder, to protect his family (McCarthy, 77). Dealing with the thief was simply an “eye for an eye” type of situation. Although it wasn’t necessary, it was justified because the thief “didn’t mind doing” the same thing to the man and the boy (McCarthy,
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.
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.
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,
Throughout a lifetime, one can run through many different personalities that transform constantly due to experience and growing maturity, whether he or she becomes the quiet, brooding type, or tries out being the wild, party maniac. Richard Yates examines acting and role-playing—recurring themes throughout the ages—in his fictional novel Revolutionary Road. Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple living miserably in suburbia, experience relationship difficulties as their desire to escape grows. Despite their search for something different, the couple’s lack of communication causes their planned move to Europe to fall through. Frank and April Wheeler play roles not only in their individual searches for identity, but also in their search for a healthy couple identity; however, the more the Wheelers hide behind their desired roles, the more they lose sense of their true selves as individuals and as a pair.
It is often said that a dog is a man’s best friend. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Crossing, a deep affection and fondness are established between man and animal. In a particular excerpt from the novel, Cormac illustrates the protagonist’s sorrow that was prompted from the wolf’s tragic death. As blood stiffens his trousers, the main character seeks to overcome the cold weather and fatigue with hopes of finding the perfect burial site for the wolf. McCarthy uses detailed descriptions and terminology in his novel, The Crossing, to convey the impact of the wolf’s death on the protagonist, a sad experience incorporated with religious allusions and made unique by the main character’s point of view.
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 fifty years later and seen fire in the distant hills. After the book was finished, McCarthy dedicated it to his son, John. Throughout the book McCarthy included things that he knows he and his son would do and conversations that he thinks they may have had. (Cormac). Some question if the book is worth reading for college course writing classes because of the amount of common writing “rule breaks”. After reading and doing assignments to go along with The Road, I strongly believe that the novel should be required for more college courses such as Writing and Rhetoric II. McCarthy wrote the book in a way to force readers to get out of their comfort zones; the book has a great storyline; so doing the assignments are fairly easy, and embedded in the book are several brilliant survival tactics.
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.
In McCarthy’s novel The Road, one of the main issues deals with cannibalism and the moral/ethic issues of survival. Though McCarthy depicts cannibalism negatively in this post-apocalyptic world, it is apparent that cannibalism is necessary for humans to survive when there is no real food to eat. Whether they know what’s actually good vs what is actually bad, they still have a reason to try and stay alive even though things are absolutely terrible around them. Staying alive, to carry the fire for the good of humanity. In a world where everything is just coming to an end, people resort to eating each other in order to stay alive. Where there are bad and good people, but what does it actually mean to be bad? Eating human beings or not helping those people in need of help?
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.
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.
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
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.