Fears While Alone in "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy Essay

The Road, a post apocalyptic novel,written by Cormac McCarthy, tells the story of a father and son traveling along the cold, barren and ash ridden interstate highways of America. Pushing all their worldly possessions in a shopping cart, they struggle to survive. Faced with despair, suicide and cannibalism, the father and son show a deep loving and caring that keeps them going through unimaginable horrors. Through the setting of a post apocalyptic society, McCarthy demonstrates the psychological effects of isolation and the need to survive and how these effects affect the relationships of the last few people on Earth.

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

The young boy and father spend most of their novel on the road. Cormac McCarthy uses the words barren, silent, and godless to describe the setting.The reader is sad and interested at the same time because you feel sorry for the characters, but are still drawn in how they are going to survive the long journey ahead of them. The father uses the road to reach the coastline to find a food source and warmer weather. Once they reach the coast it’s very cold and hopeless. The reader is sad because you think there is going to be a happy ending, but the coastline is just as bad as the road is. The road is safe but very dangerous to

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

The road written by Cormac Mccarthy; one of the most praised contemporary novels. The road tells the story of a man and a boy traveling in a post apocalyptic world. “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world”(Mccarthy1). The world is now filled with ash and inhabited by cannibals and bandits. The boy and man’s goal is to get to the south as they think it’ll be warmer there. The novel’s grammer is abstract as they’re barely any periods written as they talk. This style is used to make the reader pay attention as one can easily lose who’s talking. One of the biggest themes in the novel is the fire in all to live and stay alive; Survival. Cormac Mccarthy’s biggest critique on this novel was that the ending was too hopeful and positive, opposed to Mccarthy and the entire style of the book. The book is entirely filled with grave feelings pondering suicide and a feeling of nothing ever getting better. In the end the man dies but the boy is picked up by another man and women who seem nice. People 's opinion of the Road differ within the last pages. Though the ending might seem hopeful, it has two different interpretations, and Cormac has shown that he’s not a happy ending kind of guy.

In The Road, a father and son are living in a post-apocalyptic world filled with burnt buildings, melted bodies along the road, and an abundance of ash that has polluted the air, fighting to survive and travelling a long road to get to the coast. The father and son are stricken with fear and are constantly faced with near death experiences. Throughout the novel, the two look for food in all places they can while trying to escape “the bad guys” who attempt to kill the two on multiple occasions. When they finally arrive at the coast, they find more

In the novel The Road, Cormac McCarthy illustrates the actions, geographical setting, and expressions to shape the psychological traits in the characters struggle to find survival in the gloomy and inhumane civilization. McCarthy uses imagery that would suggest that the world is post-apocalyptic or affected by a catastrophic event that destroyed civilization. In Gridley’s article The Setting of McCarthy’s THE ROAD, he states “On one hand the novel details neither nuclear weapons nor radiation, but the physical landscape, with his thick blanket of ash; the father’s mystery illness; and the changes in the weather patterns of the southern United States all suggest that the world is gripped by something similar to a nuclear winter”(11). In other words, Gridley asserts that McCarthy sets the setting as an open mystery, so that anyone can draw his or her own conclusions. The surrounding of the colorless and desolate society affects the characters behavior positively and negatively. Similarly the surroundings and settings of the society illuminate the meaning of the work as a whole.

In the story, The Road, based on a post-apocalyptic world, a young boy and his dad travel through the woods and along the road to find what they think will be a better environment. The father thinks that if he and his son move towards the ocean they will find more good people

Cormack McCarthy’s novel, The Road, is set in a post apocalyptic world, where humanity is struggling to survive. Through his simplistic writing style and powerful symbolism, McCarthy tells a story about the human condition as well as what it truly means to be human. Though it is set in a wasteland this novel still manages to project hope through the love of a boy and his father. The following passages are quotes that spoke to me stylistically or symbolically while I was reading.

The Road portrays the journey of the father and son across a black and white world that is analogous to my experiences of the quest of survival in Afghanistan and the refugee camp in Pakistan. Where many have abandoned their beliefs and morals to survive the hellish situation. Those who survive with their beliefs and values still in intact are constantly challenged on a day-by-day basis. Their survival must be persevered to keep the fire burning, however small for their own children. There must be some goodness that remains for their children to carry into the next generations. They must always remain

For ages, people have been debating the idea of human morality and whether or not at its core humanity is good or bad. This philosophy is explored in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road. The road is the story of a man and boy living in a post-apocalyptic world. Some cataclysmic event has crippled Earth’s natural ecosystem, leaving the skies engulfed in ash and the ground devoid of much life. The duo aim to journey south as a way to escape being frozen to death in the oncoming winter. During their journey, the boy and man come across different people and places that give them a better understand of what humanity has become and where they stand on that spectrum. Throughout The Road, McCarthy revisits the idea of being the “good guy” when there is no longer a need to, “carrying the fire” as it’s detailed in the book. The dichotomy between the boy’s moral conscience and the man’s selfish ideals helps develop McCarthy’s idea of humanity losing its selflessness in the face of danger.

“The Road” depicts a solemn and deteriorating environment that can no longer provide the fundamentals to a society due to the nuclear disaster. The sudden depletion of the resources within their environment made it difficult for the father and the son to find sustenance. They were constantly traveling towards the South looking for safe places to situate themselves because the father knew that they would not be able to survive the nuclear winter. The genre of the novel is post-apocalyptic science fiction because it revolves around a dismantling society. Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” depicts how environmental destruction finally gave sense for people to value the world and what it had to offer.

The Road takes place in post-apocalyptic America after an unknown disaster occurs. The novel centers around a boy and his father, both of whom are never given names. In an analepse, the reader learns that the mother of the boy kills herself with “a flake of obsidian” as she fears that she would be raped and murdered (McCarthy 30). “[The man] hadn’t kept a calendar for years” and the reader is left unsure what year or month it is (McCarthy 2). The man is sure, however, that winter is approaching and it would be best for him and the boy to travel south where it is warmer. They have nothing but a pistol, their clothes, and a cart with food they scavenged for. The world is barren with “dust and ash everywhere” (McCarthy 3). The story chronicles the man and boy’s journey to the south while they look for food, supplies, and shelter. The pair must fend off “bad guys” during their journey as well (McCarthy 39). When one of these “bad guys” puts his knife at the boy’s throat, the man is left with no other option than to shoot the “bad guy” leaving a “hole in his forehead” (McCarthy 34). Another gruesome event occurs when the man and boy are looking for food in a house they found. While walking down a cellar’s stairs, they smell an “ungodly stench” (McCarthy 56). In the cellar, there are “naked people” who are whispering “help us” and a maimed man on a mattress with his “legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt” (McCarthy 56). These people are being kept to be eaten eventually and the man and his son

Imagine yourself living in a barren, desolate, cold, dreary world, with a constant fear of the future. The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006, is a vivid and heartwarming novel that takes us through the journey of a father and a son as they travel South in a post-apocalyptic environment facing persistent challenges and struggles. McCarthy proves that love unleashes immense strength to overcome obstacles, even in times of desperation.