Minimalism In The Road

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a man and his son on a journey through the post-apocalyptic world trying to survive and make their ways to the South where life is ideally better. Throughout the story there are many symbolic events which cause skepticism in many readers. These various occurrences are due to the works of McCarthy and his use of minimalism in describing characters, plot, and other aspects within the story. This cloaking or anonymity throughout the story is intentional by McCarthy and there are a number of reasons why he does this. He leads the audience to infer based on their own reading as to what different situations in the story may resemble. One effect which the anonymity of the characters has is a symbolic, religious inference, of the audience towards the man and the boy. For example, in the introduction of the story, the man implies that the child is “the word of god”, conveying the purity and innocence of the boy who is thought to have godlike features (McCarthy 5). Another example of the hidden identity of the boy having relevance to religion is when the man outrightly questions Eli (a character they met along the road on their journey) about the possibility of his son being “a god” which directly

In the case of Cormac McCarthy, he successfully says more by saying less and gives the story a deeper meaning of the work by giving the least amount of details as possible. Instead of blatantly unfolding the characters he tries to hide them so the audience can make inferences based on the plot of the story. This technique of concealing details within the work contributed to the idea of allowing the audience to make conclusions based on the plot. McCarthy’s purposeful use of anonymity is what made his story The Road a work which is meaningful because of its