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Identity In Cormac's The Road

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Identity is a distinctive identifier of who we are as individuals. People must learn how to construct their own identities through the actions and choices they make. Sometimes when people are influenced by society or the world around them, their own sense of identity can become unfavorably distorted. As such, it is important for people to stay loyal to themselves in order to cultivate and maintain that strong sense of identity. On the exterior, The Road by Cormack Cormac is a novel concerning the formerly civilized population and how it has been destructively altered. The novel shadows the journey of a father and his son as they travel through post-apocalyptic America towards the hazy anticipation of a better life. Now to view the novel in …show more content…

Before the world became abandoned, it was once a traditional place where people were more confident with who they were. Once civilization and its structures went to shambles, the cultivated man’s identity went down with it. With the world wide destruction, the highest focus of civilization is survival and other values comparable to materialism start to become less and less important. As the population eroded and brutality struck, the father and son are prime examples of how social trends don’t construct who we really are. The father is a representation of the old world, or old way of identity, which signifies that our true identities are embraced from within. On the contrary, the son symbolizes the new world, or new identity, and opposes his father for being stuck in the previous world that he used to live in. His father’s memories are of little significance to him because he is more concerned with the current world that they are struggling to survive in. Along the journey, the father comes across several objects that he was familiar with in the old world and was very hesitant to cut ties of his connection to them. For example, when the father visits his old home, “he [pushes] open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood

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Moreover, the novel examines the relationship between father

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His idiosyncrasy remains loving and understanding, even when his younger son returned home after many of been away with not a penny to his name. The young son showed disobedience to all the goodness his father had offered to him. The young son showed traits such as selfishness as well as being ungrateful. He had no worth for his father’s property nor did he want to work alongside his father on the family farm.

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