Cormac Mccarthy The Road

The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel about a journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm, while at the same time by the hands of mankind. Written by Cormac McCarthy, he depicts a dystopian world that has lost sight of humanity and its future. McCarthy, who has won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2008, purposely establishes ambiguous themes throughout the novel. Although Cormac McCarthy is known as a connoisseur of excessive violence, we think most of the violent stuff in The Road is justified. For all the violence and gore in novel, there's a beautiful love story at its center, but perhaps the isolation of the characters makes

In order to expose his descriptive writing of the soon to be forgotten world, he purposely wrote the novel with two types of sentence structure in mind: long and short. The long sentences go in depth with the imagery and the importance of the book while the short sentences are present only to establish an idea or dialogue. This corresponds with his descriptive writing as the reader vividly experience the situations of the father and son. Specifically in The Road, McCarthy uses dark diction to express the setting and events in the novel. McCarthy uses vocabulary such as "black, dark, gray, shadow, pale" to display the landscape of the new world and “barren, silent, godless” to emphasize the attitude towards novel. The opening section of The Road quickly captures the dark mood of the novel. The novel’s second sentence already indicates the bleakness of the world these protagonists inhabit: "Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before" (McCarthy 3). Throughout the novel, additional details of the landscape reinforce this bleak image of the heroes’ environment. "The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable.... No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees" (McCarthy 13). The general mood that quickly permeates the book is one of death and desolation, and the plot bears this out. To punctuate this mood, the father and his son are also preoccupied with death. The son asks his father whether they will die; the father believes his dreams are the lure of death. Interestingly, this perception of his dreams is paradoxical, as only in these dreams or reminiscences so far does McCarthy allow for any "life" in his descriptions. The dreams are made vivid and lifelike, in stark contrast to the deathly environment. This dark tone emphasizes certain aspects of the book, such as the boy’s pureness as well