Ambiguity In Mccarthy's The Road

“Denying what you feel will not make it go away. It ensures that it never gets resolved,” (Denial). Taking action on difficult situations allows individuals to combat reality and avoid unfavorable circumstances. However, many people think that avoiding the truth means avoiding the situation, equivalating that the circumstances are not real. This leads to other, more costly problems. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a father and son are journeying in hopes to escape the destruction around them. Similar to McCarthy’s book, Toni Morrison centers on a young African American girl, Pecola, in The Bluest Eye, who hopes to escape the ill perceptions of others in her struggle to fit beauty perceptions within her society.

Cormac McCarthy’s brain child “The Road” is a postapocalyptic novel that illustrates the harsh reality of the world. This story serves as a truth that humans, when stripped of their humanity will take desperate measures in order to survive. The reader learns; however even when it seems all hope is lost good can still be found in the world. The son character of this story illuminates this philosophy. He is a foil of his father and shows how even a person never accustomed to the luxury of a normal life can still see goodness.

One thing that remains constant in the ever-changing world of Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel The Road is the relationship between The Man and The Boy. The father and son’s bond is extremely close, especially due to the isolation they face on The Road, but it is filled with love and endearment, like someone would expect any relationship between a father and son to be.

The life of “the boy” and “the man/papa” has become a journey overall to find a home, one they can settle down on and not worry about the next source of food or water. By applying Thomas C. Foster’s literary criticism How To Read Literature Like A Professor into the context of The Road it is clearly evident that the journey the boy and the man/papa is on, is a quest. “A quest, consisting of five key aspects “(a) quester,(b) a place to go,(c) a stated reason to go there, (d) challenges and trials en route, and (e) a real reason to go there” (3) The boy and the man/papa are the questors, who are craving to find the remaining good people in the world. They’re journey is filled with obstacles presented by the thieves and “bad guys” who are initially the cannibals. However as they surpass each obstacle, as they find a new source for food, and as they find shelter for the night, they grow as a person, especially the boy who has to witness only evil within the human heart. Their goal is an undefined location, but the journey becomes more important, and the roads become the platform of their challenges. As the boy and the man carry forth with their journey, the fear of the corruption of the world enveloping them exists. As the boy tells, “Are we still the good guys? he said. [The Man:] Yes. We're still the good guys.[The Boy:] And we always will be.[The Man:] Yes. We always will be. [The Boy:] Okay.”(McCarthy 120). Because the journey to the destination held so many

"There is no God and we are his prophets."(McCarthy 140). Such a surreal, melancholy, and almost oxymoronic statement underlies the tone of “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. The concept of the story was a tale of survival of a man and his son, in a status quo of chaos and pandemonium. Marked by its grim theme, “The Road” depicts an emotionally indwelled several faceted venture to the “south.” The relationship between the father and son serves as the grounds on which the plot is devised, and without the emotional facet of their relationship the story loses key warrants of its structure. The emotional journey is vital to “The Road” as it validates the conflicts that arose, as well as served as the foundation for the plot of the story.

One would like to believe that if society did happen to fall due to some apocalypse-causing event, people of all types would come together and help one another through the difficult times. However, The Road depicts how McCarthy feels people would truly respond to such a traumatizing event; they would respond with fear and do anything it takes to provide for themselves and survive. Throughout the novel, there are countless instances where human decency is nonexistent. As the food supply on Earth is dwindling, many of the characters in the story begin to eat other people. The cannibals are breaking many of their previously-followed morals as a means of keeping their lives.

Although The Road is bursting with dangerous, horrifying, and brutal scenes, the novel is more a love story than a horror story. It is love, not fear, that keeps them alive, and it is love that prevails in the end. In the beginning, the father and son seemed a little apart. But as the father realized his duty and the son realized he could not survive without him, they began to rely on each other. Their commitment to each other was tested in dangerous and life-threatening situations but they found a way to stick together. They overlooked each other’s mistakes and were able to move forward because they knew holding a grudge or going separate ways would brutal for both of them. One critic of The Road, Jennifer Egan, observes that “with only the corpse of a natural world to grapple with” the father and son have to push through adversity. They are not provided with much but are forced to work with what they have.

The Road is a story of sacrifice in various aspects of life in a post apocalyptic world. The author Cormac McCarthy encapsulates the struggle of staying true to moral values and the preservations of them exemplifying the hardships and realizations that a give-and-take partnership of accountability brings to life. Through trials of internal battles with one another, the Man and the Boy better understand what it means to carry the fire in a world that has grown cold and dark. Psychoanalytically studying the morality in the novel opens realms of discovery for the reader.

The struggle between good and evil is essential in the post-apocalyptic world created by Cormac McCarthy in The Road. These opposing powers are present in each questioning of the boy for confirmation from the father that they’re the “good guys.” They’re present in each encounter with evil whether in the basement or on the road. On a few occasions in the book the boy struggles to perceive the separation between evil and self-protection for survival. In the beginning of the book evil seems to be the stronger force, but as the book continues good overcomes bad through morality and the unbreakable strength in the father-son relationship. The Road ultimately suggests that while evil exists, moral actions and unfaltering love will eventually overcome.

The novel The Road, written by author Cormac McCarthy, is a prime example of the extent that cruelty in human nature can reach. The novel follows the story of a man and his son travelling across a barren landscape after a post-apocalyptic event and the struggles that they encounter. This will be discussed by concentrating on theme, characterisation and setting.

Is it worth helping him? Can he live with himself if he does not help the man? He must answer these questions quickly or it may cost him his life. The son must also make a decision quickly. At the end he must decide, will he go with the man he meets after his father dies, or will he go on his own?

In a way McCarthy answers this question when it seems that the final spark of hope has fizzled out, when the boy is lost and alone. McCarthy answers the question of if the boy will also die and fade as his father as just left the world, “Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again” (McCarthy 281). Hope lives on because it wasn’t just the journey and quest of the father and son; it was the boy. And he is there the whole time, throughout the book, carrying the fire. Now he will live on, past everything that has come previously. Hope is resilient and withstands all the doom that the book could throw at

Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic fiction novel, The Road, tends to receive mixed reviews and interpretations from its readers. Some people think the book tells a depressing and nightmare-inducing read, while others think it tells a hopeful story about the prevailing human spirit. Some interpret the novel as a cautionary tale about how life depends on the environment, and some view it as an exploration of Christian and atheistic beliefs. All of these interpretations are correct, but every reader chooses to agree with some analyses over others, and those decisions are helpful for learning about each of their ideologies.

The novel is thematically focused on two important concepts in literature such as life and survival, but more in the sense of what the ethical nature is of that life. McCarthy developed his use of horrifying reality fact in the novel to show the great relationship between the father and his son, and their will to survive plus search for hope and meaning in a world of violence and immorality. McCarthy represents sacred imagery when describing the challenge that both the boy and the man’s face. The presence of Messiah in the novel is confusing. Obviously, the hesitation about God’s presence exists not only in the work of The Road but also in the mind of the man. “If he is not the word of God, God never spoke” (McCarthy 3). This line presents

The use of characterisation in a text can be used to represent complex ideas. Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, The Road, follows the journey of a man and son that face several events that challenge their humanity in order to survive the post-apocalyptic America. By studying the characterisation of the father and son in The Road, it is revealed that complex ideas are represented. Readers may find that the existentialist ideas of death and violence being unavoidable, love able to be shown through actions, every decision having both rewards and repercussions and when humans are put in extreme or difficult situations, core values and beliefs may be abandoned, are promoted through the actions and thoughts of the characters. These ideas are developed especially through the four main events in the novel through the use of dark imagery and descriptive language.