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.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is set sometime in the future after a global catastrophe. The Road follows the story of a nameless father and son, possibly the last of the “good guys”, as they travel along an abandoned stretch of highway populated with occasional marauders and cannibals. The post-apocalyptic setting plays upon the public’s fear of terrorism, pandemics, genocide, and weapons of mass destruction. Since the cause of the destruction remains unanswered, it is left open to the mind to make assumptions. The Roadi is set somewhere in the south eastern United States. There is mention of distant mountains, several rivers and creeks, and a coastline. The landscape and the air are soaked in thick, gray ash. Vegetation has been

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”

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.

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

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.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was one of my favorite fiction books that I’ve read in awhile. Although it was only written and published in 2006, his writing structure makes his work seem like an old-time classic. McCarthy’s tale of a post-apocalyptic world where a father and son’s bond are still inseparable motivates me to have the same relationship with my children someday. After some sort of worldwide destructive event that was never explained, food, humans, and hope is scarce. The names of the protagonists are never given, maybe to allow the reader to connect better to the characters, or as a device to promote the continuing theme of mystery throughout the book since a name is the most basic form of knowing someone. The pair travels somewhere in Southern United States in an attempt to get to the coast while avoiding starvation and cannibals. Both the father and son dream of what the world was like, whether it was real or imagination, and the man’s recall of his wife committing suicide in order to avoid torture haunts him throughout their journey. The

No one thinks that our world could end in the matter of days. A meteor could hit the earth causing a post apocalyptic outbreak to occur just like it did in the novel of “The Road” by Cormac Mccarthy. Some would have to grow up in the new world not knowing how the old world was like and face it head on. In this novel a man and his son give each other hope by traveling south everyday trying to get to warm weather by following the road. Even in an Apocalyptic world humanity in the boy and man raises and prevails upon everything else.

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, it is very important to both the man and the boy to distinguish between good and bad people. In this post-apocalyptic world, it is very difficult to survive while continuing to remain a good person. The importance of the separation of good and bad people is shown through a possible theme, the conflict between good and evil. It’s also shown through and example of symbolism, the fire that the boy says they must continue to carry. Finally, dark imagery shows that it is difficult for the man and the boy to remain the good guys. With these three literary elements, McCarthy shows that it is important to the man and the boy to keep a distinction between good and bad people so that they can keep hope in their world.

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.

2. The Road is a novel written by American author Cormac McCarthy. Although born in the North East, McCarthy was driven to the South West later in his life where he has since based most of his novels, including The Road. The Road tells a story of a man and his son in post apocalyptic America where the weather is winter-like and the ground is barren. Such post apocalyptic ideals relate to the views of many American citizens of the tine period in their belief that the world will soon be coming to an end. People of that time believed that when the Mayan calendar ended its last cycle in 2012, the world would come to an end. Although such apocalyptic ideas have hushed in recent years, many continue to believe that the end of the world is in the near future.

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 takes place in post-apocalyptic America after an unknown disaster occurs. The novel centers around a boy and his father, both of whom are never given names. In an analepse, the reader learns that the mother of the boy kills herself with “a flake of obsidian” as she fears that she would be raped and murdered (McCarthy 30). “[The man] hadn’t kept a calendar for years” and the reader is left unsure what year or month it is (McCarthy 2). The man is sure, however, that winter is approaching and it would be best for him and the boy to travel south where it is warmer. They have nothing but a pistol, their clothes, and a cart with food they scavenged for. The world is barren with “dust and ash everywhere” (McCarthy 3). The story chronicles the man and boy’s journey to the south while they look for food, supplies, and shelter. The pair must fend off “bad guys” during their journey as well (McCarthy 39). When one of these “bad guys” puts his knife at the boy’s throat, the man is left with no other option than to shoot the “bad guy” leaving a “hole in his forehead” (McCarthy 34). Another gruesome event occurs when the man and boy are looking for food in a house they found. While walking down a cellar’s stairs, they smell an “ungodly stench” (McCarthy 56). In the cellar, there are “naked people” who are whispering “help us” and a maimed man on a mattress with his “legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt” (McCarthy 56). These people are being kept to be eaten eventually and the man and his son

Imagine yourself living in a barren, desolate, cold, dreary world, with a constant fear of the future. The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006, is a vivid and heartwarming novel that takes us through the journey of a father and a son as they travel South in a post-apocalyptic environment facing persistent challenges and struggles. McCarthy proves that love unleashes immense strength to overcome obstacles, even in times of desperation.