Usually being able to see is a “spiritual act” and it “symbolizes understanding” (Cirlot 99). Therefore, when you take away the ability of sight, whether it be purposeful or accidental, you take away understanding and acceptance. Both the man from The Road and Natasha Trethewey struggle with accepting their reality for what it is. Their deliberate limited vision-- the choices they make to overlooks their respective bleak realities--, allow them to cope with their world. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the man and the boy are on a constant journey towards survival. Limited visibility is prevalent within different aspects of this novel. One is within the man, as he has a limited view on humanity itself. Throughout the novel, the man is …show more content…
The man knew that these people were most likely dangerous, but he purposefully limits his view to the fact that they might have some sort of food. This example reveals how in this post-apocalyptic world, there is no such thing as complete safety, or true understanding. While the man is looking through the house, McCarthy writes “All things he saw and did not see”(McCarthy 109). The man is usually very cautious and takes every precaution someone in their situation could take. In their world they will never truly have full visibility of their future, it is all one big confusing maze. Another aspect limited visibility takes on in The Road is by the darkness that is constantly described by McCarthy. McCarthy writes “He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it” (130). Natasha Trethewey’s purposeful limited view on her mother’s death in Native Guard reveals her difficult journey through coping mechanisms. Trethewey’s collection of poems revolve around ideas such as grief, her mother’s death and racism. In “Graveyard Blues”, Trethewey
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 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.
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
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
Cormac McCarthy, in his seventh novel, delves into the realm of a post-apocalyptic era in which a father and son journey to survive. McCarthy is known for his dark writing style and vivid imagery in his writings. He uses these to develop the characters and the themes of his novels. In his bestselling novel The Road, McCarthy uses this imagery and dark writing style to develop the characters of the father and son, their struggle to survive, and the themes of morality, isolation, and love.
McCarthy created a reality of his own—one that tracks a father’s loving efforts to guide his son through a landscape made wrenching by the unavailability of food, shelter, safety, companionship or hope in most places where they scavenge to survive. The Road is not just the extinction of a species or a planet; he portrays the humanly experience of the demise of civilization.
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 encounters and interactions the man and boy had while on the road help develop McCarthy’s larger theme of humanity losing its selflessness when it’s in danger. For example, while the man and the boy are traveling to the coast they come across a burnt man, half-dead lying in the road. After some observation, the boy asks the man if they could “help him” but is continuously shot down by his father who repeatedly tells him to “stop it” (McCarthy 50). The Road’s setting is one of the strongest over the weak, those who can’t survive for themselves they simply won’t. This burnt man, who was struck by lightning, is an example of that as he is now in no condition to scavenge for food and medical supplies and will probably just die where he currently sits. The boy, realizing this, wanted to do something to give the man even a small chance at survival, but the man knew he was a lost cause and should be left to die. The boy and his overwhelming desire to help the dying man is representative of old society and its pressure to help those with lesser than you, ideals that were result of religious codes and churches. But in a world where none of that matters or is present, the man is what humanity has become, selfish being whom only care about
Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is a contemporary novel written in 2006 detailing the journey of a father and his son through a post-apocalyptic world, both of whom remained unnamed. Throughout the novel, they see a huge amount of chaos: cannibals, murderers, rapists, people starving, and more. At first glance, the novel seems to be about this apocalypse and the society that develops due to it. However, that is not the case; it is really about the growing relationship of the father and son and how they interact with each other and those around them.
“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 woman pleaded for the man and their son to follow along in her footsteps and to end their lives with her due to her fear of being taken by “the bad guys” in The Road. However, the father and son did not oblige to her demands and treaded down the broken road together in search for a brighter day. The starvation and disease brought on by the weather and lack of supplies continues to deteriorate the lives that are left to rummage through the earth. In this world, it is survival of the fittest. Those who come first live, and those who come last will be lucky to obtain any scraps or remnants that may be left behind. The color black is often used to symbolize darkness, death, and remorse; three moods that McCarthy conveys throughout his writing to exhibit the amount of hopelessness and misery that the boy and his father experience on their journey.
In The Road, McCarthy utilizes basic sentence structure and phrasing to emphasize the simplicity of the novel. Not only does he rely on his uncomplex style, but the use of fragmented sentences as well. One example of the novel’s plethora of fragments is, “The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke” (McCarthy 4). In a world
The Road is a novel set after the Earth has been destroyed by some unknown calamity and hence there is ash, darkness and gloom as far as the Man’s eye as well as the reader’s eye can see. This atmosphere that we trudge through with the Man and the Boy throughout the read instantly gives us the feel of a gothic novel. A novel in which all we come across is annihilation, desolation and hopelessness.
The father and son in The Road go from darkness to light in their journey from a desolate unspecified location to a better and more inviting place and future. From the very beginning McCarthy creates a strong image by repeating “nothing” and “ash”, words that suggest darkness, introducing to the reader a world where people and places names are nameless and the darkness is a state of being. The motif of light appears at the end of the novel, suggesting a possible shade of faith. The author describes this in the scene of the boy watching over his dying father a fading light, the “light of a candle”. However, Hillcoat’s film adaptation does not capture the vast, crushed emptiness of the world envisioned by McCarthy. The film contains hope, demonstrated by the brighter lighting and continuous flashbacks portraying bright colours of nature. The film adaption also features live animals such as birds which symbolise hope. In the novel, McCarthy shows hope by describing fish swimming in the stream, whereas Hillcoat portrayed hope by showing a live beetle fly from an open can. Though they both show signs of hope and life, one was presented while the father was still alive and the other after his death.
A broken dying man, driven by sorrow and hope, and the father of a lone child, both lost in this apocalyptic world called The Road. The man, or Papa, as he is called in the story by his son, is the main character in The Road. He is a father of a young boy who has been thrust into this new world of carnage and death. The young boy has never known about the world we see all around us. Everything the Papa says is merely a story of a past long forgotten and discarded by most. Everything the boy has known in this current life is summed up in a few words, hope, hunger, and distrust. The Papa is the guide for his son leading and protecting him from the many nightmares that walk the living daylight, and prowl in the sleeping silence of the night.