Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

In the story The Road, Cormac Mccarthy implies that only in a perfect world is there a clear line between good and evil. He uses many experiences and moments in the characters journies to get the reader to think about the good and evil in the story and connect it to the real world and real life. In the story it is stated that eating people is evil which is not entirely true. It may be evil to some but a survival tactic for others. This is easily debatable. Also, the author makes us think about evil. Who are the bad guys in the story? In this apocalyptic world is everyone evil? Is everyone good? Who decides? We find that it is hard to tell who is good or evil in the story which makes us connect the good and evil of the story to the real world.

We see this in many other parts of the story. The author is trying to get the reader to think about the difference between good and evil in our modern world and let the reader see the world through the lens of someone who lives in a broken world filled with evil. Through this reading Cormac McCarthy shows that only in a perfect world is there a clear line between good and evil.

First, In the story, the little boy sees eating people as an act of evil. That is debatable which is what the author is getting us to think about. Is eating people evil? The author makes us think about this as we get more in depth into to story. Eating people may be evil because that is a person they are eating, a once-living being with a life just like the person that is eating them. But also now it’s not that. Now it is a big chunk of flesh just sitting their. There is no life, no personality and no soul. What Cormac McCarthy is trying to get the reader to see is that there is no distinct line between what is good and what is evil. In the world we live in, there is infinite evil that may be seen as good and infinite good that may be seen as evil. Humans

For the most part, we knew who the good guys were. We also saw that the bad guys were usually the ones trying to hurt the good guys. What the author was showing us was that from one person’s standpoint, someone else may be evil but if one looks through the other person’s eyes, the first person is evil. So the question is: Is everyone evil in the apocalypse? Yes. The author has implied some various reasons why one would be considered evil. To human standards, it is evil to kill someone or let someone get killed. In the story, the evil people killed humans and ate them but also the good guys saw a man in critical condition and left him to die. This makes it hard for us as readers to distinguish who is really evil and who’s not. In the situation where they father and son left the man to die, the father saw it as the right thing to do in order to keep his son alive. From the father’s point of view this was good. From the man’s point of view this would be evil. Is the father a bad guy or a good guy? He is both. He cared for his son but he dismissed a man in great need. The author is using the father as a symbol of the non distinct barrier between good and evil in our world. As the readers we are seeing the father as a good guy but if we dig deeper we see him as a bad guy as well. Clearly, the author is showing the reader that only in a perfect world is their a clear line between good and evil,