preview

Cruelty In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

Decent Essays
Open Document

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a post apocalyptic narrative that tells the story of a young boy and a man who are traveling through America in order to reach the safety of the east coast. In the story they, they both are able to survive the horrors and atrocities they come across because they find comfort in one another and live for the other’s sake. The book is written in an unorthodox form of writing style where there are no chapters or quotation marks to assist the reader. The book is written almost like a journal in order to get across the feeling of reading the last words of a man who attempted to survive. The man recalls a time where everything was normal before the disaster hit. The disaster caused everyone in the nation to turn to their more primal instincts and would do things that would otherwise be unacceptable in modern day society. The man is ultimately warped by this cruelty in the story even though he claims to be one of the last bastions of sanity left in America. The “fire” that the man and the boy …show more content…

On several occasions, the man and the boy would run into people who want nothing more than to kill them or make them slaves. Nothing grows in the world,nor is there animals to hunt. This means that humans have to cannibalize in order to live. It is not a foreign concept and could happen to anyone put in that stressful position. The first thing people do when disaster strikes is rush to the stores and empty the place out. The hope that people can return to the life before the disaster is crushed by cannibalism. The man and boy come across this truth when they run into a house filled with half eaten slaves that are used for food supply. If, by some miracle, a stable form of government comes forth and attempts to restore peace to the world, people would have already reverted to their primal instincts and will refuse to go back to the civilized

Get Access