Archetypes In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

Mccarthy creates a bleak post apocalyptic society through the use of imagery. He describes a world where there is no wildlife and all that’s left are the ashes. “The road was gullied eroded and barren. The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes. Middens of anonymous trash”(177). While the man and the boy travel the road, they rarely come across other living things. The boy even shows a lack of knowledge about animals, constantly asking his father questions about them. They always have to keep moving due to the constant threat of danger. Their nomadic lifestyle prevents them from becoming attached to anything. This gives the feeling of absolute isolation. Throughout the novel, the man often has dreams of life before. His dreams are described in vivid colors, "walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the

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.

McCarthy’s The Road exemplifies the struggle to survive throughout the entire novel. In the most trying times, during the longest stretches without food, the father’s persistence and confidence

Throughout the novel, survival is a constant objective for the boy and his father. McCarthy’s gripping and frightening moments are most obviously interwoven with this theme. Soon after the death of his father the boy looks up and sees that “someone was coming. He started to turn and go back into the woods but he didnt. He just stood in the road and waited, the pistol in his hand” (McCarthy 281). With the approach of this new potential threat, the boy’s safety and survival are brought into question. As the strange man comes near, a tension builds while the boy tries to make a decision that could quite possibly affect the rest of his life. The tension dissipates when it is revealed that the man is not a threat, but a

The love between the protagonists in the times of hardship is the most profound relationship in the book and the strength of it raises the standard of the novel. The relation of the father and the son is very strong and symbolizes protection to the child. They take the initiative to struggle and live in an apocalyptic place which has been completely destroyed. The father is like the soul of his son and the very last hope for the son to survive .The son finds support in his son when he goes through the stages of loneliness and despair. It is a natural way for people to rely on others for support and by survival instincts; it is deeper when there is such a close relationship between a father and a son. McCarthy in terms of characterization makes the buy very innocent as he does not know how to differentiate between the “good guys” and “bad guys”. He wants to help everyone and on the other hand the father is very strong and is wise. He lives each and every day as a normal day so that he can keep his son strong as well. The father is very intelligent as he responds to his son questions thoughtfully to keep his son’s hope up. The father is very optimistic even when they are facing a hard time moving forward. To quote, “The lay listening, Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn’t fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn’t fire? Could you crush that beloved

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 father views his son as the word of god and a condition that makes life meaningful. His first expression of this association occurs early in the story: “If [the boy] is not the word of God God never spoke” (5). Erik J. Wielenberg, in his essay “God, Morality, and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” claims that this conditional association is the hinge upon which all other ambiguous references to faith and God rest because with “if,” the man introduces the possibility of God existing and not existing in the same sentence. He continues to note that this conditionality also highlights God’s ability to exist through his ability to speak and therefore create (1). His interpretation acknowledges McCarthy’s purposeful ambiguity in God’s existence specifically because, rather than despite, the explicit reference to the boy

It is these extreme behaviours, which challenge and contradict the values that most individuals have been taught from the very beginning. The values the boy must carry into the future. After the mother’s death, all that stands between him and death is his father’s light. It is this light at the end of the tunnel, which allows the man to continue his quest. Despite all the wrong deeds occurring around the world, the boy progresses through his quest whilst also upholding his values such as dignity, perseverance, justice and faith. But it is a greater story of survival, it is the story of the world surviving with the morals, beliefs and laws that are at risk of losing. This concept of the story profoundly confronts my values and how others reject them for their own survival at any cost. Having experienced the environments of a refugee camp, if people were to abandon their values and beliefs just as the characters in The Road, then there would be no hope or future left for them to look forward to.

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.

Archetype refers to a generic version of a personality. Archetypes are continually present in folklore and literature for thousands of years, including prehistoric artwork. The identification of archetypes in literature is to primarily find the behaviors and characteristics of the main protagonist, it is important to discover the ambiguity of how the traits change and develop throughout the rising

This was the first piece of evidence where the author made cannibalism apparent. The roadrat’s friends boiled his body and ate him instead of burying. This is a huge example of how civilisation has downgraded after the tragic event. Depending on their level of sanity, everyone chooses their own method of survival. If there is no proper food they cannibalizing their own species is an alternative to dying from hunger.

The encounters and interactions the man and boy had while on the road help develop McCarthy’s larger theme of humanity losing its selflessness when it’s in danger. For example, while the man and the boy are traveling to the coast they come across a burnt man, half-dead lying in the road. After some observation, the boy asks the man if they could “help him” but is continuously shot down by his father who repeatedly tells him to “stop it” (McCarthy 50). The Road’s setting is one of the strongest over the weak, those who can’t survive for themselves they simply won’t. This burnt man, who was struck by lightning, is an example of that as he is now in no condition to scavenge for food and medical supplies and will probably just die where he currently sits. The boy, realizing this, wanted to do something to give the man even a small chance at survival, but the man knew he was a lost cause and should be left to die. The boy and his overwhelming desire to help the dying man is representative of old society and its pressure to help those with lesser than you, ideals that were result of religious codes and churches. But in a world where none of that matters or is present, the man is what humanity has become, selfish being whom only care about

The intentions of actions help decide whether it is morally good or evil. The man has many more blurred moral situations than the boy throughout the novel. One example of this is when he kills the “roadrat”(35), out of self-defense for his son. The man assures the boy “[they] are still the good guys”(39) even after he killed the man, because his initial intent was not to harm him. McCarthy demonstrates the idea that good gets evil and evil gets evil with the outcome of the “roadrat”. He refuses not to harm the boy and man and therefore gets killed. Although this exact situation is not the basis of the norm morality in modern society, it still helps demonstrate the triumph of good. In a regular world this intention of good can be applied to simple things, such as; a small lie in order to protect others. The novel helps demonstrate principles by using the extremes. In an apocalyptic

The first dream that the Man experiences in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road reflects the highly contrasting relationship between the bleak, damned state of the world and the undying fire of determination held by the man and the boy.

Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road in a style that is simplistically elegant. The style of the writing found in the novel is straightforward and littered with exemplary vocabulary. Through diction and syntax, McCarthy produced the solemn tone that became the breeding ground of the themes that gave the novel its identity.