Imagery And Symbolism In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

Carrying Burdens on the road

“Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before” (McCarthy 1). Cormac McCarthy uses visual imagery, symbolism, and other elements of deeper meaning to bring the world a post-apocalyptic story. The Road is a novel focused on the journey of a family, which consists of an unnamed man and his equally anonymous son, towards the southern region of barren North America after the apocalypse. The father is the son’s only caretaker and is struggling with his physical and mental health. The son is approximately ten years old and has only ever known the desolate world he was born into. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, McCarthy uses animalistic metaphors, gingerly diction, and symbolism

For example, the metaphor “Carrying the fire” is repeated often in the novel and is a form of symbolism specific to light. The father usually says this to give a goal to himself or the son. At the end of the novel as the father was dying he told the son that he needed to find the good guys who also “carry the fire”. The son responds by saying he wanted to die and go with the father. The father says, “You can’t. You have to carry the fire” (McCarthy 91). The son asks if it’s real and the father says yes and that it is inside the son’s heart. Although this dialog is finally revealing the meaning and importance of the fire some readers may have thought that McCarthy was just trying to give the audience hope for the boy’s future, but McCarthy was doing more than just that. Up until they reached their journey’s end the father was mainly carrying the hope for the future himself but he was also training the boy to continue being a good person for the sake of the entire new population of Earth. The father knew that he would die and that is why he tried so hard to keep the son as he was since birth; the pure embodiment of hope for the future. McCarthy revealed the entire theme of his novel with a few lines within a