Father And Son In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

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

In on of these near death moments, the duo were starving and with their only source of nourishment being a handful of raisins. That night the two sat around their campfire in silence being unable to come up with something to say. During this silence, the man thought to himself "The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already?” This thought by the man is part of the reoccurring theme of the colorless and stark post-apocalyptic world the man and the boy must travel through. When the man thinks this, he is in despair and numb to the world around him. He and his son are sitting at the campfire wondering if they’ll survive the next several days with the lack of food they have. Being born a considerable time before the apocalypse and have living through the start of the apocalypse, the man was a first-hand witness to the disappearance of different colors, birds and foods. In this apocalypse, said things and their names were forgotten by the survivors of the apocalypse. The color blue became history that would be forgotten; different birds like bald eagles would be tales that slowly faded to oblivion. The world had been reduced to its basic elements; there is just a few dull shades color, the creature in the sky is not an eagle or falcon, its simply a bird, differences of species and colors were to much for this new world, too sophisticated for this new reality. The loss of differentiation in the world does not have to come from some cataclysmic event bringing the world to the end; human action alone can cause such to happen. In Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring she details the unnecessary destruction of insect life by humans