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Hope In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

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In Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic novel The Road, he uses many physical objects to portray a deeper message. McCarthy creates the main character, the boy, to symbolize hope in a hopeless world.Throughout The Road the boy creates a warm presence to the cold and dark reality of what the world has become. Essentially he shines as the light of the world through all of his actions, not only with the father but with other characters that they come across in their journey along the road.
The boy epitomizes the hope in which the father needs in order to continue to go throughout the doom-laden world. Most nights the boy and the father talk about a variety of subject matter, for example, one of the nights the boy comes up with a scenario and proposes …show more content…

On several occasions the idea that the boy is “carrying the fire” repeatedly comes up(129). The idea that he carries the light of the world exists essentially because ultimately the boy resembles the last hope for the human race to move on from this situation. After his father passed away the boy traveled onto the road and noticed a man who convinced the boy to join him and his family so that he could survive. The boy, following the agreement to join them, gets a warm welcome from the mother and breathes life back into her stating that “the breath of God was his breath”(286). The death of the father represents the passing of the old world while the new family represents the hope for a better tomorrow. When seeing the boy the woman is overcome with revival of a light that can lead them out of the dark. This gives her family and herself the hope that a possible future, past all the chaos and destruction of the world, exists.
In a world without hope the boy leads the way with his inner light to guide the reconstruction of a broken society. When it seems as if no light exists at the end of the tunnel, when people stay true to their morals and unite as one anything is possible. Uniting as one creates hope when none exists, destroying the demons that plague society into

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