Conflicts in Morality People are always debating between right and wrong; some choose to follow the crowd while others go on their intuition. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, we see a boy and a man who are these outliers in society; they struggle through a journey with many temptations to give up or to become barbaric due to desperation. Traveling south down the road, the boy and man encounter many factors of evil (stealing, violence, selfishness) that are a threat to their survival. To prevent falling into despair, they remain the good guys during their survival in this post-apocalyptic world by establishing three laws: having hope, not resorting to cannibalism, and prioritizing their survival over others. In The Road, one law that is enforced by the man and boy is to have hope. In order to stray away from the insanity that is portrayed everywhere in their environment, they have to keep a positive mindset on their journey. The father does this by holding responsibility for his son; his son is …show more content…
This resilience is what differentiates between the good and bad guys. The bad guys give in to the temptations that hunger offers, however, the good guys find other ways to fulfill their starvation by any means other than cannibalism. An example is when the father and son “sat on the pack and ate handfuls of dirty snow” (McCarthy 102). This scene shows how flexible and creative they can be when it comes to finding ways to satisfy their hunger to evade the immorality of cannibalism. DeCoste states, “...who insist upon the survival of their own flesh at the cost of others' reduction to the same, have in a profound sense lost all hope of a human” (76). This quote strengthens the explanation why the father and son do not resort to eating others: it breaks their strong belief in moral ethics and sets a bad atmosphere for the youth’s growth (for which the father cares for
In Cormac McCarthy’s the road, the author conveys that although there can be despair and bloodshed in the world, love overcomes al l with a little faith. The man views the boy as a symbol for hope and provides the man with game a purpose in life, to protect the boy above all. Violence is the antagonist in the novel because the people are driven into thievery, murder, and cannibalism because of the post-apocalyptic landscape. Food is scarce and people are starving, and consequently, people turn to thievery as a way to fend for themselves. At this point in time, stealing is not a crime anymore. There is no government, there are no regulations, and all is fair. When the man says that he will protect the boy at any cost, it is not an understatement. When a member of a blood cult posed a threat to the boy, the man did not so much as fidget to reach the safety of his weapon. Without overthinking, the man shot the degenerated dead before his son. The aftermath resulted in the man soothing the boy by claiming that his job is to take care of him and that he was “appointed to do that by god.” And even states he would, “kill anyone who touches the boy” (77). He tells the boy that even if they had killed someone it would not be a
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
Hope in the face of adversity, hope in spite of the depression and mere survival they must endure, hope in the face of death and fear. One of the major themes that Cormac McCarthy emphasizes in The Road is hope: hope for a better world, hope that there are still good people out there. McCarthy uses the son as a symbol of hope throughout the novel to engage and grasp the attention of his readers. Hope is what progresses the novel, therefore without hope there is nothing.
In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the man and the boy are on a constant journey towards survival. Limited visibility is prevalent within different aspects of this novel. One is within the man, as he has a limited view on humanity itself. Throughout the novel, the man is
In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the son does not display any selfish thoughts throughout his travels with his father, but rather the contrary. At the beginning of the novel, the son runs toward a little boy standing alone in hopes to help him, though he is scolded by his father. As the father and son continue on their trek, the boy does not seem to stop mentioning the little boy, “What about the little boy, he sobbed. What about the little boy?," (McCarthy 86). Despite his father’s disapproval, the son pleads that they should accompany the little boy and bring him along their journey. He fears the for the little boy’s survival since he believes the little boy to be alone without a “papa”. The son offers to split his food rations to accommodate the little boy, even though he is well aware of the scarce food supply him and his father encompass. Along with the encounter with the little boy, the son again displays his generosity and concern with an old man named Ely, “The boy took the tin and handed it to the old man. Take it, he whispered. Here," (McCarthy 163). As the boy watches the old man eat, he turns to his father to ask the same question: can we keep him? and once again the father opposes the idea. Also in
The Road by Cormac McCarthy details a post-apocalyptic world with mysterious origins. While there are many questions about this world, the reader is left to their own imagination to determine how it got that way. Within this world, there is a man and a boy, father and son trying to make their way and survive until they can find a safe haven that may or may not exist. The see many things along the way and the man instills in the boy that it is important to remain a good guy and always “carry the fire”. Carrying the fire refers to the light inside of you that makes you who you are and may also carry the “goodness” of human nature. Inevitably, the man meets his fate via a mysterious illness leaving the boy on his own. The boy is then introduced to a family that has been following them knowing that the man was not well and the boy would need someone to look after him.
The novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy was published on September 26, 2006. The Road depicts the struggle for survival between a father and a son. In the gray and ash covered world, featureless, and bleak, all that remains is a corrupted world where destruction will bestow upon anyone who comes in its wake. Nevertheless, in a post-apocalyptic world, devastation isn’t the only adversity they have to withstand, rather, the position it puts the human race. The lack of food caused many survivors become cannibals and roam the roads looking for victims. However, hope played a significant role in their journey of obtaining survival. The father and son were seen continuously encouraging and reminding one another to keep faith alive by carrying the “fire” in their hearts. Cormac McCarthy implies in his novel, The Road that the boy is seen as the man’s only will to live and his son’s divine spirit that inspired him to be good-hearted, which proves that people can survive through anything, as long as they have something worth fighting for.
The language of “the Road” By McCarthy is scant yet poetic and morally inspiring. The text is composed not of chapters but of discrete, punctuated paragraphs that mirror the movements of the father and son on their journey. McCarthy's writing style reflects sparseness in that he chooses to write in fragments and he keeps the father's and son's dialogue very choppy. Authors style of narrating this story is very scrappy and sparse, which describes the infertile and miserable land through which the man and boy are traveling. In the book we noticed, McCarthy makes less use of quotation and apostrophes. There are no brakes through dialogues. Because this is a post-apocalyptic story, the exception of these punctuation basics might help as a way of author to show that in this new world, fragments of the old world such as materialistic objects and humanity exists in scarce amount. McCarthy’s narrative voice is powerful and completely shapes the stories he tells. The story begins with the man and boy making their journey along the road. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world, date and place are unnamed. One can assume it is somewhere in America, most of the South, because the man tells the boy that they're walking the "state roads"(43). Neither the man nor the boy is given a
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.
The Road is a novel written by Cormac McCarthy set in a dystopian society. The text follows a boy and his “father” through the lawless world. The boy and his “father” take the reader through a journey through the post-apocalyptic world. The author Cormac McCarthy entertains his readership of The Road through using multiple core techniques. Cormac McCarthy expands on each technique as a form of entertainment for the reader and to draw the reader further in.
Throughout the novel “The Road by Cormac McCarthy, it displays the tale of survival, a world infested with murder, crime, and despair. However, the author conveys that although cruelty may arise in the world, love overcomes violence and that humanity has not been completely lost. Within the book, violence is shown in a great depth, thus because humans are thrown into a world filled with thievery, murder, and cannibalism as the result of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Despite the crimes that occur, altruism has been explored within the novel. Altruism is best described as the “willingness to do things that bring advantages to others, even if it results in disadvantage for yourself” (Dictionary Cambridge, 2017) Furthermore, two lessons that McCarthy conveys to his readers is that although one may help
Humanity disagrees about tradition, religion, party choice, and almost everything that people could agree or disagree with, but music has the power to put aside all those differences and bring people together. The Road by Cormac McCarthy takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where everything including the sweet sounds of music is gone. No matter the time or the place, music has an effect on every living human being. Whether it’s the first time hearing music or listening and bonding with friends over the new top song, music is what people can always rely on to create endless sounds of joy. The people in this book have a feeling of emptiness and silence in which now they forget what those beautiful sounds are like.
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.
In The Road, the boy searches for justice, even though he does not fully understand what justice means. Merriam-Webster defines justice as a "quality of being just, impartial, or fair" or "the establishment or determination of rights according to the rules of law or equity". The boy somewhat understands the meaning of justice, by looking to his father for help and guidance. "The father and son continue to hold fast in their morality", which allows them to continue being just individuals, while most of the other individuals descend into barbarity and savagery ( Moon 51). The boy comprehends the idea that there are just people and unjust people on the road. The man and the boy seem to be "the last moral individuals on an Earth which is all desert" ( Miles 4). All the boy knows is that he and his father are the only good, just individuals on the road. The boy's father informs him: "I don't think that we're likely to meet any good guys on the road" ( McCarthy 151). The fact that the man and the boy are the only good guys on the road confuses the boy. The boy knows about the good and bad guys, but he does not know
The boy who travels with his father finds purpose to survive in believing that they will one day find the good guys. In this he believes that they themselves carry the torch of being the good guys and finds hope in that. Throughout the novel, the boy expresses his heart for helping others several times when he gives an old scraggly man on the road a can of peaches, pleading to help a man who got struck by lightning, and by being worried about a boy who was alone they had passed on the road. The boy evidently through his actions expresses a need to help others. When the boy spotted another little boy from the road, he ran over to where he had seen him and searched for him. When the Father saw that the boy ran off, he grabbed the boy by the arm and said “‘Come on. There’s no one to see. Do you want to die? Is that what you want?’” Sobbing, the boy replied, “I don’t care, I don’t care” (85). The boy sees the little boy as alone with nothing and he feels like it is his responsibility to his own