ipl-logo

Contradiction In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

1529 Words7 Pages

In everyday life, there are so many people worth to love and worth for giving them much affection. But have you ever thought, who is your dearest? For everyone, the answer may be grandparents, mothers, siblings or friends. For the boy in McCarthy's novel,"The Road", his father's image will forever be the sacred fire that warms his soul forever. "The Road" written by McCarthy not only about the relationship between a father and his son but also about the contradiction in itself every human. Have you ever wondered how many contradictory thoughts that you have in a single day? How often do your actions go against thinking? How many times have you felt your feelings against the principles and beliefs of yourself? Most of the time we do not recognize …show more content…

The father doesn't help anyone to make sure that his son has enough food to eat to survive. He refuses to help the others and he doesn't need to share what he has with anyone. Because of that, his son will survive longer. When he meets a boy about his son's age, he can take the boy with them. But maybe he is afraid that if he does so, he will be distracted in protecting his son. As when he meets the thief, though he knows that chase will be dangerous, but he still chases him because of the blankets and the food, which can keep his son survives. That is why the father says to his son that “‘What do you think would have happened to us if we hadnt caught him?”’(McCarthy258). When he caught the thief, he asks the thief to take off everything. He says, "'Take your clothes off", "Take them off. Every goddamned stitch", "The shoes", "Put them in the cart"'(McCarthy256,257). He does that not because he needs these things, but because he doesn't want the thief has a chance to follow them and steals from them again. He still does that even his son asks him to not doing that. The father's consistency in decisions indicates that he volunteer to be a bad person for the protection of his

Show More
Related
1765 Words | 8 Pages

answers, Krakauer develops his own theory that McCandless consciously chose to avoid any human relationship after his separation from his family, so that he could bear, without fully appreciating, the loss of such relationships. For example, Krakauer states that McCandless continued to head north after Ron Franz, an elderly man who treated McCandless as his son, expressed a desire to adopt him. He explains, “McCandless was thrilled to be on his way north…relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the emotional baggage that comes with it. He had fled the catastrophic confines of his family. He’s successfully kept Jane Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him.

Read More
1446 Words | 6 Pages

He even steals a typewriter from his stepfather’s work place to get money after he leaves home because he is afraid of going home. However,

Read More
334 Words | 2 Pages

“The Father” a short story by Hugh Garner presents the protagonist, John Purcell, the father as a selfish, irresponsible, and prejudiced man. During the story when his son Johnny comes downstairs in a pair of flannels and a blazer he seems to show concern as to why Johnny is not wearing his scout uniform, although he is actually concerned as to how this will make him look as a father. As his wife tells him the reason why his son doesn't have the full uniform he wonders angrily “if the scoutmaster thought he was too cheap to buy the boy a uniform” (2). Even though at first it may seem like he cares about his son's appearance the underlying reason for this is that he cares about how this will make him appear as a father and what others

Read More
837 Words | 4 Pages

Every time his father is in trouble he does something to save his father. He would do anything to save his father, when he said “I woke from my apathy only when two men approached my father. I threw myself on his body. He was cold. I slapped him.

Read More
1085 Words | 5 Pages

When it comes down to humanity and survival there’s only one way to determine what will happen, selfishness. Elie Wiesel wrote the novel Night, in 1955 to share his experiences with the audience. Elie Wiesel was a survivor of the holocaust and decided to create a book to tell his story of his life during the holocaust at that particular time. There are various statements, morals, and themes, that can be taken from the book Night. This particular essay will have the main contention of the effects of human instincts when it comes to survival.

Read More
462 Words | 2 Pages

I can only see the residual affect of love from within the family I belong. To me, other love is invisible and incomprehensible as I measure it to the type I am so familiar with. In the short story A Primer For The Punctuation Of Heart Disease, the author Jonathan Safran underlines the specific dynamic within his family by accentuating their unorthodox view of love and affection. I knew that families loved each other deeply, obviously, but it was outward appearance of such feelings that confused me. I ignorantly, judged different families actions against that of my own.

Read More
1590 Words | 7 Pages

One among the universal themes in poetry or literature in general is family conflict. For Theodore Roethke, George Bilgere, and Raymond Carver, the difference between a good parental role model and a flawed role model is what creates conflict between parents and children. Each poem, “My Papa’s Waltz,” “Like Riding a Bicycle,” and “Photograph of My Father in his Twenty-Second Year” all focus on a toxic father-son relationship. Major images that describe the dysfunctional father-son relationships are fears of a drunken father, pretense, and regret. In addition, these poems imply that fathers or parents in general, often pass their flawed parenting styles down to their children.

Read More
624 Words | 3 Pages

The father’s wife had recently died, leaving him with the boy to take care of with the only mindset of keeping him alive, doing anything for their survival. This affected the father in a big way, leaving him with little hope and hardly any reason to stay alive, but the boy was “his warrant” (McCarthy 5) , his only reason for life. The boy starts out very scared and weak, always wanting to hide behind his father, knowing that one day he will die. The boy matures with every event that happens, and he maintains to have hope throughout most of them. “The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead.

Read More
310 Words | 2 Pages

Faith is an important part of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. Faith is what keeps the father and son alive. It is faith that gets them through troubling times, when all else fails. Faith is needed throughout the novel when things appear to go wrong. After being awoken by falling trees the father assures the son “it’s

Read More
1889 Words | 8 Pages

The Road by Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a father and his son in an unspecified apocalypse. In the colorless and dreary post-apocalyptic world the man and his boy must survive on what scraps they can find left over from the old world to survive their journey south down a long road to the coast hoping to find a better future for themselves there. On the road, the man and the boy encounter other survivors most of whom are cannibals, remnants from the pre-apocalyptic world, and supplies and scraps they use to sustain themselves in their dreary world. This quest, marked with fortunes and misfortunes, ends in both success and failure for the father-son duo. Even though man and child both make it to the coast, they find it to be no different

Read More
631 Words | 3 Pages

Even though the man tell his child that they are the “good guys”, he ignores others who need help. When the man and his child spotted the man who was struck by lightning, the child asked his papa to help him. However the man said to his child, “But we have nothing to give him. We have no way to help him. I’m sorry for what happened to him but we cant fix it” (McCarthy, 50).

Read More
1034 Words | 5 Pages

Thesis People are social creatures that require affection that is first received when being an infant. People’s mentality changes if a child or a person does not receive affection especially from their families. In a short story titled “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” written by Joyce Carol Oates which presents a protagonist who does not receive much affection from her mother compared to her sister. While the antagonist shows some sort of affection to the protagonist, her decisions are impacted by how her family treats her. It is not the protagonist fault of her decisions made during the incident, but the mothers.

Read More
905 Words | 4 Pages

We are the protagonists of our own lives. There is no doubt that the centers of our lives are our selves. Every day is tantamount to a movie with its plot materializing in our every move, from the smallest details that our body do to the wide range of imagination and rational thinking that occurs in our mind. In line with this, I will try to diverge myself from my own story and look at the story of another person by understanding the plot of his story, examining his story’s characters and relating the identified morals of his story to my own life. “Éclair” is a movie about a boy named Akio who lost his family at a very young age.

Read More
1178 Words | 5 Pages

“They took mommy. They said she was just going to cook them dinner, but she never came back.” I felt my heart throb, remembering that that was what they did when they took my father. “It’s alright. I’m just going to help these men with their broken cart.”

Read More
1007 Words | 5 Pages

Literature often elucidates the shared aspects of human nature. F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, explains, “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you 're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” Both Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path” and Bernard Malamud’s “The First Seven Years” illustrate the importance of unconditional love to humanity.

Read More

More about Contradiction In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

Open Document