Character Analysis: The Road

1. Being unsure what to expect from this book; following our other readings my initial reaction to The Road, was that of surprise at such a dark story never expecting such a tale of a dystopian future. The protagonist character is much like any of us in life, as he is doing the best that he can with what it is he has. Our main character represents the animalistic viewpoint of survival at all costs. His son on the other hand is a manifestation of the human emotion incarnate. These characters are representative of the two-sided coin that is human nature. Whenever our protagonists are faced with a decision on whether or not to help someone in need the father always utterly refuses which makes sense, only when weighed logically. Consequently

The cause for the destruction is not made explicitly clear in The Road. Basically a grievous event took place, which the readers are lead to believe it was man-made. “ A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window”(McCarthy 52). Said event is not wholly a result of simply one thing that man has done to create this situation. Nuclear war would have decimated all life and there would have been a complete mass extinction and an allusion to radiation would exist somewhere within the novel. Basically, the event is a culmination of all that man has done both to the earth and to each other. The Road is war, famine, environmental destruction, and economic collapse all rolled into one Chipotle sized burrito. Some of the results of the event that occurred are seemingly endless fires. “Everything was alight as if the lost sun were returning at last”(McCarthy 31). The land is described as “...cauterized terrain”(McCarthy 14). Cauterization is a method for sealing wounds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries , which used hot steel to burn the skin closed. Finally the smoke that billows incessantly could be wildfires that are now unabated. Caused by the breakdown of society, there is no structure in place to fight the blaze, whether they are because of destroyed ecosystems, or man-made fire from