Morality In The Road, By Cormac Mccarthy

Humans by nature live for the means of survival, meaning their actions are neither good nor bad, but only intended to keep them alive. In the novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, the setting takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where it follows the journey of a man and his son as they make their way down a road hoping for a better future. The novel presents the idea of morality on multiple occasions and brings into question how morals change or become ignored in a world of chaos and lack of order. The overall theme of The Road is the fragility of human civilization, and how something, such as a natural disaster, can bring all that we have built crashing down. McCarthy incorporates the use of tone, metaphors, and imagery, in order to reveal

As the man and boy leave the beach, they come across a desolate town. The man wants to search through the abandoned buildings in the hope of finding food and supplies which they used up at the beach. As they are making their way across town, they hear something that “whistled past his head and clattered off the street and broke up against the wall (..)” (McCarthy 263). The man then “felt a sharp hot pain in his leg” (McCarthy 263), which signifies how the man and boy are being actively hunted. The being shot is being done for a reason, the hunter is hunting them in order to feed himself. Cannibalism has turned to active hunting of human beings, supplies have grown barren and the only thing of “abundance” is human beings. When the man becomes injured by the arrow, he “clawed the blankets to one side and lunged and grabbed the flare gun and raised up and cocked it (..)” (McCarthy 263) The man's actions are that of animalistic imagery, he is acting in the way prey would act. This imagery is significant due to it demonstrating the decivilization of human society and how order that was once put in place through laws and rules has come tumbling down to a basic kill-or-be-killed society. This scene of the man and son being hunted also demonstrates the loss of morality and how the hunter doesn't discriminate when it comes to survival. Everyone is fair game. The man then shoots the hunter with his flare gun, which makes contact with how “they could hear the man screaming” (McCarthy 263). The man runs inside the home and searches for the hunter and instead, he finds an older woman holding the killed hunter. The man asks her if the others left her there, to which she replies maliciously about how she “left herself here” (McCarthy 265). The man did what he did to survive. Though killing the hunter is normally