Literary Analysis Of The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

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.

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 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.

An important flaw the son has is that he does not remember the world as a peaceful place the son only remembers the world destroyed. This type of naivetes gives the boy a minimal outlook on the past and see the difference of the present. The father knows the difference which gives the father the realization before The Road begins. The son in portions of The Road is starving, this desolate place called the world does not give any chance of hope or second ones. The importance of this geographical state in the book makes the father and son rely on one another because they know the very importance of staying alive, and the only way they can do that is to fight for one another. The Road opens with a setting of desolation, “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him”, which creates a concern within the readers that are realizing the magnitude of this horrible place. (McCarthy 3) The son in the first page of the book is mentioned

Literature is a door that opens to an author’s past experiences and emotions. Every impactful moment that an author experiences will sneak its way into the pages of the texts. In the novel, The Road written by Cormac McCarthy, many of the events taken place correlates with poignant points of his life.

Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written many novels relating to violent and post-apocalyptic genres. McCarthy has won multiple awards for his novels such as the U.S National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for the novel All the Pretty Horse. His novel No Country for Old Men also won four Academy Awards. In addition to that, The Road, also won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. The Road is a story about a little boy and his father who journeys through post-apocalyptic America. Many have named this novel an american classic due to one of many reasons- the loving and personal relationship between the father and his son despite the fact that any traces of life is essentially dead.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a novel written in 2006 about a father and a son who travel through a dystopian landscape of the United States. The book can be very compelling to read, primarily because of its unpredictable plot, but also because of several unique features it possesses. These features, including the novel’s setting, weather, and season could be explained by Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, which, because of the voluminous literary elements it explains, can also be compelling to read. Foster’s explanation of these elements can help to describe why McCarthy uses enduring quests, significant meals, and harsh weather as well as an apocalyptic setting and a cold season in The Road.

Both for the young and old, love is vital when trying to maintain hope and faith. Love is the candel needed to shed the light required to navigate one’s life. In the novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, by the boy acting as the man's moral, spiritual, and motivational compass, the author depicts his belief of how love will keep one strong even in the darkest of times.

In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a boy and a man battle the unforgiving voyage of a world where an apocolypse has occoured. They leave everything they have to go and try to find some safety and refuge. The two battle to stay alive versing hunger, dehydration, and cannibalism. There are many points in the book where I didn’t think they were going to make it, where I thought they were going to just lay down and give up. Yet they don't give up at all, they keep going until they cannot go anymore.

“I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me” says Joshua Graham, who, although a video game character, speaks words of wisdom on the subject. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road develops characters who frequently utilize fire on their post-apocalyptic Earth for warmth, cooking, and protection. These usages are evidently essential for endurance, but the story also presents this element in a more significant manner. The boy and his father consistently mention the phrase “carrying the fire” throughout their incessant journey. Contributing to an insightful meaning of the entire novel, the fire is a symbol of humanity’s residual hope in survival and morality.

This novel surveys a time in which the world is literally a man eat man planet and it shows the day-to-day struggles that The Boy and The Man are faced with. Cannibals roam the streets and it’s expected of someone to be cruel to another person that they find wandering the streets. It was once necessary for The Man to kill someone for the protection of both him and his son. "You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you” (McCarthy 65). They were threatened by a man that held The Boy hostage in his arms with a knife and when The Man saw the knife and the danger that the cannibal, or “Bad Guy” as The Boy would say, was to his son, he shot him.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s novel portrays a gripping tale of survival of a father and son across a post-apocalyptic world that is devoured by marauders and cannibals that have abandoned all of their beliefs, morals and values and will do anything to survive. In contrast, the two protagonists are portrayed as the ‘good guys’ who carry the ‘fire’, and survive in the obliterated world with their own beliefs, morals and values constantly being challenged by the antagonists. As a young adolescent who has experienced the harsh environments of a war torn country such as Afghanistan, and have prior experiences of being a refugee. The novel presents several scenes that challenge my even my own past experiences and the author

The Road by Cormac McCarthy was a comeback that redefined what his usual literary voice embodied. Instead of focusing on a science fiction-based plot, it was more of a love story between father and son mixed with the horrors of a world without structure. Without names or physical descriptions, there is nothing to say that someone is unable to relate to the story. Many aspects of it apply to modern-day living, but culture is the most realistic since everyone experiences it. Culture develops over centuries when a group of people begins repeating their actions, making it a habit. The problem with the culture in literature is how repetitive and centric the plot becomes because it is usually based off of what is happening in real time. Cultural

The book I chose to read for my independent reading assessment is the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This novel was mainly about a man and a boy, whose names were never mentioned, that take a dangerous journey along a road through a post-apocalyptic world. There was an unknown disaster that caused the Earth to be destroyed. This apocalyptic world no longer had any electricity, running water, and humanity. The father does everything in his power to keep the boy safe from any dangers, for example, the “bad guys” or the people that eat dogs and people.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is his post-apocalyptic magnus opus which combines a riveting plot along with an unconventional prose style. Released in 2006, the novel has won awards such as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award (Wilson). Oprah Winfrey also selected the book for her book club ("Cormac McCarthy”). The author, Cormac McCarthy, was born in 1933 in Rhode Island and is said to have wrote the novel because of his son and their relationship. The Road centers around a boy and his father while they try to survive after an unknown disaster occurs. While some people may argue that the unusual style takes away from the novel, it adds to the tone and meaning of the work.