The Road

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.

In the book The Road by McCarthy, McCarthy dramatizes the opposition between good and evil however, over all The Road puts forth a positive and uplifting view of humanity. Even though there are multiple parts throughout the book that focus on very dark and pessimistic themes, McCarthy has a way of making the reader see darkness and pessimism a positive and uplifting theme.

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

The road written by Cormac Mccarthy; one of the most praised contemporary novels. The road tells the story of a man and a boy traveling in a post apocalyptic world. “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world”(Mccarthy1). The world is now filled with ash and inhabited by cannibals and bandits. The boy and man’s goal is to get to the south as they think it’ll be warmer there. The novel’s grammer is abstract as they’re barely any periods written as they talk. This style is used to make the reader pay attention as one can easily lose who’s talking. One of the biggest themes in the novel is the fire in all to live and stay alive; Survival. Cormac Mccarthy’s biggest critique on this novel was that the ending was too hopeful and positive, opposed to Mccarthy and the entire style of the book. The book is entirely filled with grave feelings pondering suicide and a feeling of nothing ever getting better. In the end the man dies but the boy is picked up by another man and women who seem nice. People 's opinion of the Road differ within the last pages. Though the ending might seem hopeful, it has two different interpretations, and Cormac has shown that he’s not a happy ending kind of guy.

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.

Hope and humanity are two very important aspects of human nature and without it, life would be very catastrophic to mankind. Cormac McCarthy is the author of The Road. The Road is a dystopian story of an adventure of a father and his young child over a period of several months, over a scene impacted by an unspecified disaster that has demolished a large portion of human advancement and, in the mediating years, all life on Earth. The Road, is plagued by absence such as an absent hope and absent humanity. These absences reveal that without hope and humanity people can’t survive. Cormac McCarthy argues that without hope and humanity, humans can't continue to survive because when people lose hope, they lose their ability to dream for the future and humanity as a universal emotion, people must it have in order to survive for a long time.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road portrays a gripping tale of survival of a father and son across a post-apocalyptic world that is devoured by marauders and cannibals who have abandoned all of their beliefs, morals and values and do anything to survive. In contrast, the two protagonists are portrayed as the ‘good guys’ who carry the ‘fire’, and try to survive in the obliterated world. They are challenged to maintain their own beliefs, morals and values as they enter their quest. As a young adolescent who has witnessed the harsh environments of a war torn country such as Afghanistan, and has prior experiences of being a refugee. The novel effectively

“No plants grow, no sun shines through the ash-plagued sky and, save a single dog, no animals survive. The dead outnumber the living in shocking proportion, and of those few living humans, most are barely human at all,” stated by Ashley Kunsa in her essay, “Maps of the world in its becoming: post-apocalyptic naming in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.” No one knows exactly what event caused this tragedy, but life turned upside down for the few survivors. McCarthy focuses on two characters: a father and son duo and shares their experiences in this new world. Throughout the novel, they each share different life lessons with each other.

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.

Despite the despair he creates, McCarthy insists that, in its essence, The Road is a book about "goodness". Paradoxically, the extremely hopeless setting that McCarthy creates reminds us that our world is still worth saving. Throughout the book, McCarthy juxtaposes the bleak setting with glimmers of colour and life from the “dying [pre-apocalypse] world”; he often relieves the reader from his depressing reality using heavenly visual imagery such as “green and leafy [canopies]”, and “flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue”. These flashes of colour – “green” positively connoting to life and “blue connoting to tranquillity – are juxtaposed with the bleak setting, which emphasises the bleakness of the world and makes the reader realize the grim consequences of our destructive actions on our planet. Through this, McCarthy warns us that we are not taking care of our Earth, and as a result, humanity is on the verge of causing the greatest global extinction since the dawn of life.

“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 Road is a story where is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where the date and location is unnamed. The author of the novel Cormac McCarthy doesn 't describe why or how the disaster has demolish the earth. But after reading the novel, I can sense that the author wanted to present a case of mystery and fear to the unknown to the reader. By the author 's exclusion I think that the story gains a better understanding of what the author wanted to express to the reader. An expression of a man and his son surviving in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is his post-apocalyptic magnus opus which combines a riveting plot along with an unconventional prose style. Released in 2006, the novel has won awards such as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award (Wilson). Oprah Winfrey also selected the book for her book club ("Cormac McCarthy”). The author, Cormac McCarthy, was born in 1933 in Rhode Island and is said to have wrote the novel because of his son and their relationship. The Road centers around a boy and his father while they try to survive after an unknown disaster occurs. While some people may argue that the unusual style takes away from the novel, it adds to the tone and meaning of the work.

In a desolate world ravaged by fire, a boy and his father trudge across the countryside. They encounter people in their most desperate times where their motives are unpredictable and noone can be trusted. The boy and his father try to maintain their morality while facing starvation and having to deal with unpredictable people they encounter on the road. Cormac McCarthy in his novel The Road, uses the theme of hope to demonstrate the human trait that purpose is essential to survival.