Some readers of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) have disputed that the characters in the novel are on a “Quest for God” especially when the future looks so bleak and hopeless as it does in this novel. Why would McCarthy be on a quest for God? For instance, Steven Frye (2009) believes there are a deeper human experience and reflection is what McCarthy writes about and not a “Quest for God”. Frye refers to this passage in The Road,” Just remember that things you put into your head are there forever…You might want to think about that. You forget some things don’t you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget” (12). This example shows that the characters are using experience from their past, not looking for a God or are they? There are many times in the novel that the reader, is wondering are they looking for God, even though there is instances that the reader declares no the characters are just trying to endure another day. I believe that God is a force in the book and McCarthy is also trying to point us on a better path than we are currently on. The path we are on now is a life of destruction in carrying a lot of evil; also McCarthy is saying either we stop and listen to what God is trying to tell us or this will be our world.
To validate this claim of a ‘Quest for God’ one might point: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions “(52). This could be referring to a bible verse of Revelations 1:17; if the readers know their bible verses well they will catch these subtle hints. In Revelations of the Bible: “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the La...
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...Quest for God” within the pages of the novel. I trust McCarthy is trying to tell us to change our ways and live by the rubrics God gave us or face the consequences of our exploits. The author himself is querying if there is or is there not a God, therefore he sent the characters of this novel on a quest of their own. When the author himself is throwing out the query throughout the novel how can you not believe there is a search for God.
Works Cited
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print.
Frye, Steven. The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. South Carolina: U of South Carolina, 2009. Print.
Biblica Incorp. "Bible Gateway Passage: Revelation 1:17 - New International Version." Bible Gateway. Bible Gateway, 2011. Web. 10 May 2014. .
Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is a novel in which religion is of great importance. One of the main themes in this novel is faith in God and oneself, and even more, the conflict between belief and doubt. Irving writes in such a way, that this is very evident throughout the book. John Wheelwright, at the start of the novel, is a young boy who does not seem to know much about how strong his faith really is. Part of the reason for this, is that the choice between believing in and doubting God is that there isn’t any complete evidence that He even exists.
McCarthy’s novel is not about a boy trying to find his place in society, but about a boy trying to find himself and who he really is apart from society. John Grady begins the story with no answers, and at the end he still doesn’t have a clue. There is no resolution for him; there are only more questions, conflicts, and misunderstandings. I think that McCarthy’s point is that to live romantically is to live without cause, without real hope, and ultimately without love. Despite the author’s obvious compassion for John Grady and his idealism, he shows us through romantically descriptive writing that a romantic lifestyle cannot work in this world. The book ends with John Grady riding out into the sunset, having learned nothing, with no place to go. Until the character learns how to compromise with society and give up his romanticism, his life will have no purpose.
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the author makes various references to the Bible and to religion. Those references also can be compared on how they have changed the way of humans in real life. Along with how the boy maintains his innocence throughout this whole book even when he witnessed events that could’ve changed him. The man tried to the best of his abilities to preserve the innocence of the boy. Through all of the obstacles that they both faced, the man managed to keep the boy safe and even in his last moments he was sure that he taught his boy how to tell when people were good.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
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.
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.”
He is expressing his opinion to his audience in the hopes that they will recognize this and try to change how the world is; Cormac McCarthy is hoping that someone will decide that they need to become more just, and thus begin to bring justice back into the world. Throughout the novel Cormac McCarthy is expressing his idea that justice no longer exists, which he views as a problem, through having John Grady search for justice yet never find it. Not only are we presented with the issue at hand but we are also presented with the solution; be a just person and bring back the justice that is lacking in the world today. He shows us this solution when he has John Grady search for the true owner of Blevins horse even though the judge has labelled the horse as
I have conflicting thought regarding Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. My initial thoughts of the novel were that it was solely built on the complete devastation of two characters lives and the surrounding landscape and their constant search for survival. However after giving it further insight I discovered the underlying messages of the importance of good and bad people in my life, the beauty of the little things in life and constant greed showed by desperate individuals. I believe the novels successes comes from the messages of the significant value of human life and the importance of memories in our lives.
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
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
People always like to refer to themselves as “independent”. Independence may seem like a great ideal in modern society, but in a post-apocalyptic world, a sense of dependence is unavoidable. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs help us to understand what people depend on. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, survival of the boy and the man is due to their dependence on their human nature and ability to support one another.
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...
Everyone has their own different opinion of how they want to interpret religion, but there are always some common things that can be picked out from any religion and that is the image of a prophet or a Messianic figure. That can be seen in McCarthy’s book that the boy is seen in the image of a Messiah, because he has been kept pure throughout all of the havoc that has happened. There was an instance when the father was looking at the boy and he thought: “Then he just sat there holding his binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: if he is not the word of God God never spoke” (McCarthy 5). What can be taken from that part is that it is uncertain if the boy believes in God, but it is certain without a doubt that the man does. He believes that the boy could be a symbol of holiness. Shelly Rambo asks the question of, “how are we to interpret this language within the context of a world that bas collapsed? The context is critical here. How do we read images such as the breath of God and the Messianic references to the boy after the end of the world?” (Rambo 104). Like stated before, everyone will have their own interpretation of what is said in this book. Some will interpret it with a deep spiritual meaning and some may not have a literal interpretation to it. But it can be seen that the boy might have the same type of
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996.