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The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

1005 Words5 Pages

Ben Lee

Mr. MacDonald

Post-Apocalyptic Literature

June 7, 2023

Human Condition: When Humanity Meets Its Extreme The Road, a novel by Cormac McCarthy, depicts a journey about a father and his young son’s journey on the road as they make their way to the South in a post-apocalyptic world. The novel engages readers by highlighting many interactions between the characters, especially the interactions between the father and his son. Their journey begins as they search for the warmer region to call home. They experience challenges through external obstacles and internal conflicts. By reading the novel, the readers are pushed to reconsider the human condition as the characters reach their breaking point. The Road by Cormac McCarthy effectively …show more content…

McCarthy presents several survivors who turn to robbery or violence against others for resources, even causing people to turn to cannibalism for survival. Through the conversation between the father and the mother, she states, “They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us, and you won't face it” (42). This passage conveys worries about potential harm, including rape, even cannibalism, and other forms of violence of the will to survive. The violence in the world has become predictable, allowing other characters to show violence if given a chance. Apart from them, McCarthy details the relationship of father and son who maintain their humanity and dignity and refuse to let themselves be destroyed. As they travel the road, the son encounters “a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (157). This horrifying scene also highlights the human desire to survive by depicting the most barbaric and selfish act of eating a baby, however, despite encountering painful experiences on their journey to the South, the father and the son demonstrate the instinct to …show more content…

Despite the chaos and the brutality of the world, love thrives. The father demonstrates his unending love for his son by saying to die with him in the cruel and pointless world. This is illustrated in a conversation between the father and the son: “ [the son:] Can I ask you something? [the father:] If you died I would want to die too. [the son:] So you could be with me? [the father:] Yes. So I could be with you” (8). McCarthy uses the father’s thoughts of suicide to demonstrate a commitment he makes to his son that he won’t let his son die alone. In contrast to the father’s devoted love for the son, the son displays love for others. The son’s love for others is apparent when he and his father come across strangers on the road. For instance, the son asks his father “What if a little boy doesn’t have anybody to take care of him” showing the boy’s love and compassion for the little boy (65). The son thus stands for the hospitality and hope that exist in the face of despair. By illustrating different expressions of love from various characters, McCarthy highlights the undergoing power of human relationships and love, even in the post-apocalyptic

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The mother affirms grief after conversing about her husband with tears running down her face. In the following quote: “Your father always acted like he was the roughest, strongest man on earth. And everybody took him to be like that. But if he hadn’t had me there to see his tears!” (Baldwin 42), further presents the emotional commitment she dealt with for years.

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In Cormac McCarthy’s novels, The Road and All the Pretty Horses, the protagonist and their companion(s) face many hardships during their respective journeys. Although each story takes place in completely different situations, they share common themes and dramatic plot points. When transformed into movies, Hollywood transforms these stories through vivid visual images that the written word does not quite grasp; overall making one work more outstanding while leaving the other to fall short of the audiences’ expectations. Even though written by the same author, The Road and All the Pretty Horses carry completely different story lines leading to conflicting themes. The Road depicts the struggles of a man and his son during their journey south

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Feel two bodies crash to the floor, and hear a woman's voice wail in pain. And even though it’s so quiet, even twenty feet away, I know the sound of air moving aside as a fist comes down, again and again. ”(45) This description of Free Lunch shows that violence can get out of hand and really hurt someone, mentally and

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(McCarthy 250) By saying this, it becomes evident that the man is not able to continue without the boy in his life. Without the boy, the man would no longer be carrying the fire and no longer wish to

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From beginning to end, the son calls his father “Baba” to show his affection and admiration. Despite the father’s inability to come up with a new story, the son still looks up to him. This affectionate term also contrasts with the father’s vision of the “boy packing his shirts [and] looking for his keys,” which accentuates the undying love between the father and son (15 & 16) . The father’s emotional “screams” also emphasize his fear of disappointing the son he loves so much (17). Despite the father’s agonizing visions, the son remains patient and continues to ask for a story, and their relationship remains “emotional” and “earthly”--nothing has changed (20-21).

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In everyday life, there are so many people worth to love and worth for giving them much affection. But have you ever thought, who is your dearest? For everyone, the answer may be grandparents, mothers, siblings or friends. For the boy in McCarthy's novel,"The Road", his father's image will forever be the sacred fire that warms his soul forever. "The Road" written by McCarthy not only about the relationship between a father and his son but also about the contradiction in itself every human.

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Have you imagined how the post-apocalyptic world will look like and will you choose try hard to survive or to die? In the book, The Road, written by McCarthy, the sky is dark. It’s cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. Everything has gone, only except some human beings who try every way to survive even by hurting and killing people.

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The father’s wife had recently died, leaving him with the boy to take care of with the only mindset of keeping him alive, doing anything for their survival. This affected the father in a big way, leaving him with little hope and hardly any reason to stay alive, but the boy was “his warrant” (McCarthy 5) , his only reason for life. The boy starts out very scared and weak, always wanting to hide behind his father, knowing that one day he will die. The boy matures with every event that happens, and he maintains to have hope throughout most of them. “The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead.

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Some days they go hungry, the weather uproots their lives, and other hindrances place a awful, dark outlook on life. Cormac Mccarthy writes about a disgusting world. It is the dying of lie on the planet, the end of the world. Not only do the gruesome events in the novel led the reader to take an opposing view, but even the setting of the novel

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In enduring these complex emotions, this section was the most remarkable part. One of the first apparent emotions the boy experiences with the death of his father is loneliness to make this section memorable. The boy expresses this sentiment when he stays with his father described as, “When he came back he knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again,” (McCarthy 281). The definition of loneliness is, “sadness because one has no friends or company.”

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This scene is the first time the father's psychological battle of needing to kill his son has been put to the test, ultimately traumatizing the son for a short time after. This trauma is revisited in a new way for the son later in their journey as the father finds him in a state of complete despair and horror, saying “What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (McCarthy 198). This sight is so traumatizing and brutal that the father knows the psychological damage done is far too much for the boy to handle, acknowledging “He didn't know if he'd ever speak again” (McCarthy 199). This event sparked the flooding in of the previous experience with cannibalistic survivors, causing all the terror of before to combine with the present into one psychologically terrifying experience. The father then has

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When the cannibals, known as ‘the bad guys’ walk past they are described as ‘An army… marching past… a phalanx carrying spears or lances’ with ‘wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war’. McCarthy has used a metaphor, linking the convoy of men to an army, to make them different from the reader and thus establish a divide between the reader and the cannibals, like the man and boy have done. Despite their differences becoming exaggerated by McCarthy, the cannibals share similarities with the man and the boy; they all suffer the grey apocalyptic world, they all travel on the open road and all do what is necessary for survival. Like the ‘bad guys’ who resort to cannibalism for survival, the man resorts to what is necessary for his and the boy’s survival; he kills a man with a pistol, and another with a flare gun. He also chooses to not help some people, as doing so would affect their well-being.

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Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, covers the journey of an unnamed man and boy as they travel across the desolate, “charred ruins”, scrounging leftovers of the “vanished world” to postpone the inevitable death invariably looming over the two. As the man and boy struggle to survive in the harsh environment, against the lack of resources, and the “bad guys” who resort to cannibalism, slaughtering and consuming those they find along the road, McCarthy comments on what is good and what is bad in the society and explores how the man and boy are able to remain good. Through the man and boy’s experiences, McCarthy also comments on luck as the man and boy are able to survive on the brink of death. Throughout the course of the novel,

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