In the novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy has a very dark and sinister tone, but what exactly gives the novel this feeling of dread and hopelessness? The element that gives the book its uniquely dark feel is cruelty, cruelty is defined as:callous indifference to or pleasure in causing pain and suffering.Cruelty in “The Road” not only sets the tone of the story it also shows how barren and barbaric life is in a world where the strongest people are also the cruelest.
From the very first page of the novel the reader understands how barbaric life is in this new world where all emotion and good intentions has been replaced with cruelty. This new post-apocalyptic world is filled with cruelty, and the reader witnesses this very early in the book,”
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In the very beginning of the book most readers are bored of the gray, depressing world of “The Road” but this is only used to set up a grand build up to a horrific event. The reader truly understands just how dark, appalling world is on page 110,”on a mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt(110).” This occurrence reinforces the dark tone of the story and gives the reader the idea that it can not possibly get any worse but little does he/she know that it gets substantially worse. The dark tone is restated again much later in the book, after The Man and The Boy found a house with a massive amount of supplies. The duo had it great, but after they left that blessing of a safe house, they witnessed something truly grotesque that McCarthy made sure would be etched into the mind of anyone who read it ”the boy had seen a charred infant headless and gutted (198)”. The reader knows that “The Road” is a very dark book:however, the reader did not expect that the killing and consumption of human infants to be practiced, even in a world where nearly no good intention is