Morality In The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, is an enticing, but soul-wrenching novel that perfectly conveys the precise conditions of a cold, desolate world, in which one feels utterly isolated. McCarthy does not hesitate to go into detail about powerful or foul events within the plot. He says exactly what he means, and can effectively incorporate forceful interactions between the characters and each other, as well as characters and their given environment. By using the literary devices of symbolism, imagery, and theme, McCarthy handcrafts a novel with such eloquence and grace that such a bleak and miserable world is perhaps a seemingly beautiful one.

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 ability to paint beautiful ideas on a canvas of dark events and imagery is an essential skill in the arsenal of an accomplished writer. In his novel The Road, Cormac McCarthy demonstrates his understanding of this skill. A reviewer from the San Francisco Chronicle described The Road saying, “[McCarthy’s] tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy’s stature as a living master. It’s gripping, frightening, and, ultimately, beautiful.” These descriptions of the tale are true throughout the novel, but particularly at the ending of the story. In the final pages of the book, McCarthy continues to engage the reader with gripping and frightening moments, to emphasize the theme of survival, and to reveal beauty and “the miracle of goodness.”

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

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

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

The life of “the boy” and “the man/papa” has become a journey overall to find a home, one they can settle down on and not worry about the next source of food or water. By applying Thomas C. Foster’s literary criticism How To Read Literature Like A Professor into the context of The Road it is clearly evident that the journey the boy and the man/papa is on, is a quest. “A quest, consisting of five key aspects “(a) quester,(b) a place to go,(c) a stated reason to go there, (d) challenges and trials en route, and (e) a real reason to go there” (3) The boy and the man/papa are the questors, who are craving to find the remaining good people in the world. They’re journey is filled with obstacles presented by the thieves and “bad guys” who are initially the cannibals. However as they surpass each obstacle, as they find a new source for food, and as they find shelter for the night, they grow as a person, especially the boy who has to witness only evil within the human heart. Their goal is an undefined location, but the journey becomes more important, and the roads become the platform of their challenges. As the boy and the man carry forth with their journey, the fear of the corruption of the world enveloping them exists. As the boy tells, “Are we still the good guys? he said. [The Man:] Yes. We're still the good guys.[The Boy:] And we always will be.[The Man:] Yes. We always will be. [The Boy:] Okay.”(McCarthy 120). Because the journey to the destination held so many

In the midst of immorality, God always provides a solution. Although the world has been close to complete immorality in the past, morality has never ceased to exist. The world in The Road by Cormac McCarthy is very close to amorality, but God shows that he is working through the man and boy. McCarthy uses two Biblical allusions to Israel to create two themes for the reader. The first is an allusion of the man and boy’s journey to the exodus of Israel out of Egypt. This allusion shows that the man and boy are God’s chosen people in their amoral world. The second allusion is the boy to the Messiah of Israel and the rest of the world, Jesus. The allusions to Jesus show the reader that God has a plan of hope for the world through the boy. Both of these allusions show that not only is the world not “godless”, but God is actively working.

It is these extreme behaviours, which challenge and contradict the values that most individuals have been taught from the very beginning. The values the boy must carry into the future. After the mother’s death, all that stands between him and death is his father’s light. It is this light at the end of the tunnel, which allows the man to continue his quest. Despite all the wrong deeds occurring around the world, the boy progresses through his quest whilst also upholding his values such as dignity, perseverance, justice and faith. But it is a greater story of survival, it is the story of the world surviving with the morals, beliefs and laws that are at risk of losing. This concept of the story profoundly confronts my values and how others reject them for their own survival at any cost. Having experienced the environments of a refugee camp, if people were to abandon their values and beliefs just as the characters in The Road, then there would be no hope or future left for them to look forward to.

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.

People preach peace and love around the whole world, but at the same time practice the opposite of what they believe, and such behaviors cause the Road happened. It will eventually even become a cycle: the more people hurt each other, the less they believe in God and social morality, and the more they become soulless, the more likely people will express irrigation with violence. With enhancing wars and revenges on earth, it gradually turns to the world described in the Road: “No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather” (McCarthy). In the Road, the world lacking of food and materials is not created by people with belief and faith; instead, faithless politicians and authorities who preach the gospel of power compete against each other and, disregarding the death of thousands and the significance of natural balance, converse the world into a miserable circumstance, which leads to the extermination of belief of those who are still alive.

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

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 intentions of actions help decide whether it is morally good or evil. The man has many more blurred moral situations than the boy throughout the novel. One example of this is when he kills the “roadrat”(35), out of self-defense for his son. The man assures the boy “[they] are still the good guys”(39) even after he killed the man, because his initial intent was not to harm him. McCarthy demonstrates the idea that good gets evil and evil gets evil with the outcome of the “roadrat”. He refuses not to harm the boy and man and therefore gets killed. Although this exact situation is not the basis of the norm morality in modern society, it still helps demonstrate the triumph of good. In a regular world this intention of good can be applied to simple things, such as; a small lie in order to protect others. The novel helps demonstrate principles by using the extremes. In an apocalyptic