Narrative Structure Of Tolstaya And 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.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is an enlightening novel that makes many allusions to biblical stories in which we know today. From the structure to the details that McCarthy provides helps to see the connection between the story and the bible. McCarthy alludes to many stories of the bible, not just one. There are many specific examples in The Road in which it is connected with the bible.

The setting of each of these books is of a world gone awry. In the book The Road the world is bleak and gray there is no sign of anymore life besides the few humans that remain in the aftermath. “With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless,” (McCarthy 4). The world in McCarthy’s book is gray both in the visual sense and the metaphorical one. The Road is metaphorically gray as the entire world has gone to ruin and is left rot losing its glorious colors that it once held. The world is also literally gray, as it is covered in a layer of ash due to the end of the

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 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.

Christian envisioned the periodization of world history like a puzzle and the pieces of the puzzle were the theoretical, organizational, ethical, and technical problems of the periodization. Christian was able to solve the problems of the periodization of world history, since his “organizational aspects of all periodization systems moderately well in its first and third eras” (104). This is valid since the author arranges the book in chronological order by providing the reader with a list of main events in a chart (Era of Foragers- page 2, The Agrarian Era- page 26, The Modern Era- page 59) which allows the reader to know understand the sequences of each era. Also, he provides the readers a glimpse of the main ideas to help the readers understand a specific time period. To illustrate, “Explaining the Modern Revolution” on pages 64-67 “explains why rates of innovation have risen so fast during the modern era” which includes Accumulated Changes of the Agrarian Era, Rise of Commercial Societies, and Development of a Single Global Network. As mentioned on page 98, periodization problems appear because world historians have difficulty choosing what are the important

For years, post-modern writers have foreshadowed what the end of the world would look like through dramatic representations in literary works. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Margaret Atwood’s novel, Oryx & Crake, are no exception to this. Delving into the complexities that underlie man’s existence on Earth, these authors use their novels as vehicles to depict a post-apocalyptic world, in which all that once was is reduced to an inconceivable wasteland, both figuratively and literally.

Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel, The Road, conveys the world’s loss of faith in God after mass destruction strikes. The setting gives the novel its barren post-apocalyptic atmosphere. The author uses biblical allusions: Book of Revelation, Book of Kings, and aspects of Jesus to give the reader a better understanding of the characters McCarthy links the novel’s desolate setting to Book of Revelation, to give depth to the plot. “Barren, silent, godless. ”(1).

A well renowned founder of western philosophy, Socrates stated,“False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil”(Socrates). This quote relates to the evil that Senator Joseph McCarthy and antagonist Abigail Williams brought to their time. Abigail used her opportunities to strike fear into everyone in her town. Arthur Miller was one of the Hollywood 10 accused of being a communist and that affected his life which he wrote The Crucible to not only show the Salem Witch Trials but to give insight to the readers about the time during McCarthyism. The Salem Witch Trials were a series of witchcraft cases brought before local magistrates in a settlement called Salem which was a part of the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 17th century (History of the...,3). Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that over 200 communist have infiltrated the U.S government, as result the 1947 Taft-Hartley act had an anti-Communist clause that required union leaders to take an oath stating that they were not communists (Facts about McCarthyism, 6). McCarthyism and The Crucible were very similar in the way they were governed, there judicial systems and the way they blamed people.

The world is advancing so rapidly today, it seems that it will never stop growing in knowledge and complexity. In the novel “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, The Time Traveler, as Wells calls him, travels hundreds of thousands of years into the future through time. He arrives at a world that, at first glimpse, is peaceful and clear of any worries. As The Time Traveler explores the world, he discovers that the human race has evolved into 2 distinct forms. Although the world appeared to be the Garden of Eden, it was, in reality, the Garden of Evil. Wells uses three aspects of the futuristic world to illustrate this: the setting, the Eloi, and the Murlocks.

Cormac McCarthy has a quote that has really stuck with me it is, “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” Life has given me a humongous scar. The summer before our senior year, Hunter Wolfe was killed in an accident at work. Something you would never expect happening to anyone. After the accident, you look at life in a different light. For me it has been my first experience of a death. There has been so many emotions that have come to me that I have never experienced. Now that football has rolled around I have been really hounded on by my emotions, because that is where our friendship started.

Archetypal criticism follows a basic rule of categorizing or relating any work of literature into a set framework. It works from a subjective basis, it is used to determine and grasp the ideas of universal truths messages through literary work. The universal truths and messages are determined by identifying patterns like character types, storylines, settings, symbols. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel that accurately exemplifies the principles of archetypal criticism. This narrative account associates the characters of a young minor and his father to encapsulate the ideas of archetypal criticism. McCarthy presents the novel by setting the scene of a death-defying journey through a post-apocalyptic wasteland of America. The young lad

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.

“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.

“He just hides it better—There! Look at him now.” Toke gestured to Dexter a few yards away resting his back against a tree. Sure enough, Dexter’s hand was to his face as his eyes slid slowly over a young woman standing near him who only wore two polished sticks through her ears and a tiny skirt made of feathers.