Color And Symbolism In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

Colors can represent many different things. Artists utilizes colors in their artwork when they want you to portray a certain emotion or see what they are trying to express. For example, when an artist is trying to convey sadness they will often use dull colors like black or gray. When an artist is trying to express happiness they will use bright colors. In the novel The Road, Cormac McCarthy uses colors to describe various scenarios and for symbolism. He uses the colors gray and black to show how deadly and full of despair their world is. The color yellow is also important because in the novel it symbolizes hope. Although these are not the only colors that McCarthy uses, they are the ones that are the most significant. The man’s dream world

4). These two sentences set the setting and what the road is like. The gray light is a symbol of depression. Gray is a boring and dull color that shows no affection or fun. Every scenery he describes is gray and desolate. It is used to show how the world they live in is so deadly. McCarthy utilizes the color black to represent how cold and heartless their world is. On page 277 he writes, “downcountry a storm has passed over the isthmus and leveled the dead black trees from east to west like weeds in the floor of a stream” (McCarthy, pg 277). This novel is infused with death. The setting of this quote is an example that portrays how plant life in this world are dying or dead. McCarthy shows how their world is vanished of vivid color and is replaced with blacks and

The appearances of the color yellow symbolized hope. The first memory is remembering the “yellow leaves” (McCarthy, pg 13) as the man recalls the day he and his uncle rowed across a lake to pull a stump for firewood. The yellow leaves in the first scene were encountered through a childhood memory of hope, which was an introduction to the fire that represented hope and the will to survive. The second memory is in the man’s childhood home where “they walked through the dining room where the firebrick in the hearth was as yellow as the day it was laid because his mother could not bear to see it blackened” (McCarthy, pg. 26). The yellow bricks in the second quote shows the location where the fire has been. The very first memory relates to the man and the boy because it shows that they performed the ritual of this memory every evening in collecting firewood. Both of these quotes relate to fire and in the novel, fire represents hope and humanity. Another significant quote that included the color yellow is “the man that hove into view and stood there looking at him was dressed in a gray and yellow ski parka” (McCarthy, pg. 281). The description of the man’s parka who finds and helps the boy at the end of the novel was the final occurrence of the color yellow. The boy found new hope towards the end seeing as his father passed away. The employment of the color