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.

Imagine a desolate and dismal world that deteriorated with scarce supplies of food and shelter and there is only a few survivors left--including yourself and one of your family members. In hopes of survival, what measures would you take? Would you go to the extreme by cannibalism or committing suicide? On the other hand, would you choose to be on an ethical route by grasping on life delicately? In the midst of the unflinching and empty world with virtually no hope, the father and son in the novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, choose to be the “good guys” by staying alive and refraining from cannibalism and thievery. They tried desperately to remain alive by roaming as nomads looking for shelter, edible foods, and avoiding the “bad guys”

In Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” the fire is an allegory for purity, hope, humanity, and the drive to survive without turning into the malicious monsters that the people around them have become. The father is very hopeful and convinced that “nothing bad will happen to them because we’re carrying the fire”(83). He also convinces his son that the fire isn't around them but is “inside of you. It is always there. I can see it”(234).

Isolation is one of the most severe forms of punishment that anyone could be faced with. Cormac McCarthy shows the reaction isolation had on the characters in The Road. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, follows an unnamed father and son as they travel towards the coast in search of safety after the world has been destroyed by a catastrophe. As they travel the road, the father has to protect his son from the threat of strangers, starvation, exposure and harsh weather. In The Road, Cormac McCarthy shows how humans react to isolation by when the man leaves others to suffer, taking drastic measures and when the man kills other men.

Violence has been a part of America's history for centuries on end and it cannot seem to be escaped: “Between 1900 and 1925 the nation’s homicide rate swelled by nearly 50 percent. The increase was especially large in major cities; Baltimore’s homicide rate doubled, New Orleans’s and Chicago’s tripled, and Cleveland’s quadrupled. During the first half of the 1920s alone, lethal violence doubled in Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, and Rochester, New York” (Adler 36). The Road by Cormac McCarthy demonstrates the aftermath of violence and the violence that is continued in order to maintain life. The Road moves the reader through the story of a father walking with his son across a burned America. The winters are cold, the nights are dark, and danger

Violence is defined as a behavior involving physical or mental force intending to hurt, damage, or kill someone. In the words of Zak Ibrahim, peace is defined as the proliferation or the increase in the existence of Justice. But where does love fit in to these conversations? Violence cannot necessarily transform into love, but the presence of it is surely important. Violence involving our most loved ones, helps us find love and compassion in the toughest of situations, and leads us toward paths of peace. In this essay, examples will be drawn from Zak Ibrahim 's keynote presentation, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Beautiful Boy; a film directed by Shawn Ku, and Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.

Good moral is what makes a good person. Why would you want to be good when everything around you is bad? How can you want to be the better person when the only a reason to live is to avoid death? Morality is a principle concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. The road is a novel written by Cormac McCarthy that tells the story of a boy and a man fighting the dead society. The world has been destroyed, cities have burned, and more than half of the population has died. They are fighting to keep their good ethics and morality while still not trying to die. In an apolitical world the only reason to listen to morality is to believe the world will change and that being good will one day make a difference.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a story of a father and son who are in a post-apocalyptic world, where all they have is the things on their back and each other.Their goal is to cross the desolate and scorched America to reach the west coast where they might seek refuge and a better life. Most of the book the characters are walking across roads and scavenging food so that they can stay living. Their only defense is a revolver the father keeps in his pocket that only has two rounds in the chamber and their bare hands. After traveling for sometime the father and son encounter a group of marauders and quickly get out of sight because the father says that they are the “bad guys.” After discovered by one of them, the boy is held hostage by one of the marauders for a few brief moments until the father pulls the trigger killing the man that tried to take his son. This part is the first major conflict of the story and proves that the father is willing to do anything to protect his son. As the book goes on the father and son continue to walk across state roads and many other roads that were once apart of the United States of America. They come across a few more people who were also “bad guys,” as described by the father and have to take the appropriate measures to deal with those, “bad guys.”

Cormac McCarthy’s tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing, yet deeply personal work, published in 2006. A setting stripped of all natural life with a father and son as the sole survivors of a post nuclear holocaust. The Road is essentially an existential tale as the father and son have one focus: to survive and to attain some meaning in their lives. Without any cultural and economic influences, the father and son must carve out their existences from a world devoid of life. The only meaning that they have come from the paternal and filial love that they feel, the essence of the family and life.

In The Road Cormac McCarthy displays how the development of a relationship can adapt subsequent to catastrophe. The Road, awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and later cinematized, is commonly identified as a notice directed to those in parenthood. McCarthy advertises that the genuine ‘end of the world’ does not signify to give up and lose hope, especially when it comes to family. McCarthy in fact states the opposite, that the ‘end of the world’ provides a grander purpose to preserver, which to many might seem paradoxical. Based off substantial context in McCarthy’s The Road, the relationship between the boy and his father strengthens its integral composition through tragedy and the will to live.

Dystopian fiction is an alternate society characterized by a focus on that which is contrary to the author 's ethos, portraying it as mass poverty, public mistrust, police state, or oppression. This genre was chosen because it allows for readers to feel better and thankful for our society’s current state. The works that I used to investigate this genre were The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and 1984 by George Orwell. All of these books are categorized in the dystopian genre but have very different symbols, styles, and implications. Each of these novels have different styles because some include a society with overbearing rules, such as Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, whereas The Road has virtually no society. Despite their differences, the purpose of these novels is to demonstrate that the only thing strong enough to conquer a corrupt and inhumane society is through true love and passion.

In order for a child to live in a complete and happy family, the paternal love plays a major role in a child’s life, especially the love of a father which is as much important as a mother’s love for a child. Moreover, a father’s love is one of the greatest influences on the child’s personality development throughout his/her life. A father’s love brings a sense of protection of security in a child. In the novel The Road, Cormac McCarthy presents the great example of paternal love. The novel deals with a post-apocalyptic story about an unnamed man and his unnamed child as they move toward the south to find a better place to live after the catastrophic event. The son is the only reason for the father to survive in the post-apocalyptic world.

What do we do when the people, places, comforts - the entire world we know - are gone? If you have survived long enough to ask this question, then you are now living in a post apocalyptic world. Due to the World Wars and the Cold War, writing about post apocalyptic ideas was amplified. But what exactly is an apocalypse? Nowadays, we typically think of an apocalypse as a worldwide disaster that can dramatically affect civilization, like war, famine, plague, natural disasters, and nuclear fallout. These scenarios qualify as apocalypses today because they signify to us the very real possibility that life as we know it could end. In the case of the post-apocalypse, the cataclysmic, civilization-altering event has already ended just like the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy. However, some post-apocalyptic literature features scenes from during the apocalypse, like I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and World War Z by Max Brooks. Post-apocalyptic science fiction describes situations in which our ability to predict and control fails catastrophically. Nature escapes our control, through worldwide plagues, collisions with asteroids; or else we are done in by our own efforts at control, by nuclear war or human-induced ecological catastrophe. Post apocalyptic literature reaches out to people to show them that governments are in some cases corrupt and that there are many issues that impact society and the balance of it. All of the cataclysmic events that occur in these books have much

Civilization is the basis of life, driving human interaction in everyday life. The texts, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, depict civilized and uncivilized situations, which reflect on and elaborate characterization. This can be seen explicitly with the creature (Frankenstein) and the boy (The Road). Both novels address the civilized and uncivilized in different approaches, however similarly emphasize the significance of the character’s traits and development. The ways that each character approaches civilized and uncivilized situations and behaviours, relate to the character’s experiences and emotions directly in the case of the creature, contrary to the inverse relationship in the case of the boy. The

“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.