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Morality In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

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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

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