Allen Josephs What's At The End Of The Road

In the road, Ely has obviously given up on life, and people in general. “Things will be better when everybody’s gone… when we’re all gone at last then there’ll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too.” While Ely is not hateful or evil towards human beings like the bad guys, neither does he feel any inclination to help others. If he ever had a purpose in life, it would have been religion based, as he says “When I saw that boy, I thought that I had died,” and to the man’s question, “What if I said that he’s a god?” he replies, “I’m past all that now. Have been for years. Where men cant live gods fare no better.” The phrase “where men cant live gods fare no better” can be interpreted to mean that men carry their gods within them. When men get broken by suffering, their gods also disappear. McCarthy seems to be implies that religion centered purposes are also selfish and self-centered and that it is one’s own happiness and comfort that allows one’s god to exist. The Man is similarly selfish in purpose, which centers around the one boy, his son, who he deems his salvation. The man is able to kill other people with no hesitation when it comes to protecting the Boy and similarly shows no inclination to help others. Only because of the Boy’s begging and the recent replenishment of their food supply, does the Man allow the old man to share a meal with them.

In the novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy illustrates the expressions, settings and the actions by various literary devices and the protagonist’s struggle to survive in the civilization full of darkness and inhumanity. The theme between a father and a son is appearing, giving both the characters the role of protagonist. Survival, hope, humanity, the power of the good and bad, the power of religion can be seen throughout the novel in different writing techniques. He symbolizes the end of the civilization or what the world had turned out to be as “The Cannibals”. The novel presents the readers with events that exemplify the events that make unexpected catastrophe so dangerous and violent. The novel reduces all human and natural life to the

In each novel of his personal literary journey, Cormac McCarthy examines death and God in different ways. Edwin T. Arnold, who wrote his essay “Blood and Grace: The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy” before The Road, examines how “McCarthy’s protagonists are most often those who, in their travels, are bereft of the voice of God and yet yearn to hear him speak” (14). In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the father explicitly describes his son as god; however, by juxtaposing the father and the son and examining their divine resemblances, it is not the boy but the man who embodies God, supporting Ely’s claim that this post-apocalyptic world is too harsh for God to exist.

Hope and humanity are two very important aspects of human nature and without it, life would be very catastrophic to mankind. Cormac McCarthy is the author of The Road. The Road is a dystopian story of an adventure of a father and his young child over a period of several months, over a scene impacted by an unspecified disaster that has demolished a large portion of human advancement and, in the mediating years, all life on Earth. The Road, is plagued by absence such as an absent hope and absent humanity. These absences reveal that without hope and humanity people can’t survive. Cormac McCarthy argues that without hope and humanity, humans can't continue to survive because when people lose hope, they lose their ability to dream for the future and humanity as a universal emotion, people must it have in order to survive for a long time.

Faith is a hard thing to master, and sometimes obtaining it is even harder. Many of the character in this novel have different opinion on whether the usage of faith is relevant in this apocalyptic world. The difference between good and evil is a relevant idea in the road, everyone that we come in contact with we are always pose with that one question, “are you one of the good guys?”. For There to be a good guy there has to be a “bad guy”. To separate the “good guys” from everyone else. This question that is posed leads to many different aspects of a person; trust, will, and belief. In Cormac McCarthy Novel, The Road, McCarthy uses Character flashbacks, motif, and religious allusion to show the separation between good and evil.

In the novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, the theory of Existentialism can be easily seen through various key components. Existentialism is a philosophy that accentuates an individual’s existence as a free being who is entirely responsible for the choices they make. It questions the human existence and whether there is any purpose of living; it is a notion that declares that an individual must define their own meaning in life and attempt to make rational decisions while existing in an irrational universe (Crowell). Such existential concepts are showcased throughout the book as an unnamed father and son travel across the United States where an unclear cataclysm has occurred destroying almost all life on Earth. They are striving to survive in this world where murder, cannibalism and sex slavery have become the norm. They are faced with inhumane situations and barbaric people, forcing them to make crucial decisions. It is understandable that the father and the boy are undergoing an existential crisis when being placed in this post-apocalyptic world where they attempt to fulfill their ultimate goal of reaching safety by abiding by their morals and depending on their hope while questioning their faith in God.

How does Cormac McCarthy’s Novel The Road, challenge a reader’s ideas, beliefs, experiences and values?

We often consider the world to be filled with core truths, such as how people should act or what constitutes a good or bad action. In The Road, McCarthy directly challenges those preconceptions by making us question the actions of the characters and injecting a healthy dose of uncertainty into the heroes’ situation. From the very beginning, the characters and their location remain ambiguous. This is done so that the characters are purposely anonymous, amorphously adopting all people. While on the road, the order of the day is unpredictability; whether they find a horde of road-savages or supplies necessary for his son’s survival is impossible to foretell. While traveling, the boy frequently asks “are we the good guy” and the father always replies with “yes” or “of course,” but as the story progresses this comes into question.

People preach peace and love around the whole world, but at the same time practice the opposite of what they believe, and such behaviors cause the Road happened. It will eventually even become a cycle: the more people hurt each other, the less they believe in God and social morality, and the more they become soulless, the more likely people will express irrigation with violence. With enhancing wars and revenges on earth, it gradually turns to the world described in the Road: “No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather” (McCarthy). In the Road, the world lacking of food and materials is not created by people with belief and faith; instead, faithless politicians and authorities who preach the gospel of power compete against each other and, disregarding the death of thousands and the significance of natural balance, converse the world into a miserable circumstance, which leads to the extermination of belief of those who are still alive.

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

often referred to as the Son of God.) I feel that these are the two

What makes Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road stick out from most dystopian works is that The Road takes place not before or during but after the end. The novel follows a man and his son as they survive the dangers of what once was the United States after an unspecified calamitous event. There is not much left of the world: no food, no animals, and no hope. Many readers will ponder how someone could still be motivated to keep moving forward under such circumstances. If we were living in the same conditions as the man and the boy, this question might seem more imperative. But arguably it is a question that can be applied to today: what, if anything, makes human life valuable or worthwhile? Through the dialogue between the characters, the novel provides two conflicting arguments that serve as potential answers for this question. The first argument is hope, which is associated with the Christian religion, while the other argument is futility, which has a nihilistic outlook of the ravaged world. This paper will examine the Christian imagery and nihilistic arguments contained in the novel and how the moral systems of the two conflict. While at first The Road might present itself as a powerful challenge to both Christian and nihilistic views of the world, in the end, the novel never explicitly reject either worldview.

The most substantial of these claims is the God is that which no greater being can be conceived. The fact that both sides can hold this as

Man is the very proof that God exists. Because man is imbued with a thinking mind that realizes that he gets all his powers, best of all his thinking mind, from his idea of God, then it is impossible for man not to realize that what he perceives of God clearly and distinctly in his mind is a reality, and that reality is the existence of God, a perfect being who can never deceive because by His perfect Being, God is free of defects. God, as a perfect being, is incapable of fraud and deception, two things that are caused by defects. God's existence is manifested in the way man is able to use his thinking powers to accept his limitations, and at the same time realize that someone greater than man has endowed man with the powers to think and discern clearly and distinctly the idea of a Supreme Being.

The philosophical arguments presented in this document are not of religious text, nor scientific observation or established fact. Rather the premise of this God proof is bring together and share the various theories on which other God proofs have established foundations. I have heard it quoted that “Philosophy goes where hard science can 't, or won 't. Philosophers have a license to.” Therefore, with this in mind, I attest that it is more than problematic to construct an argument authenticating the unequivocal proof of the existence God. If nothing else this may be food for thought.