The Road, By Cormac Mccarthy

In American author Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road, we read about a journey that a dying father and his beloved son travel through across a post-apocalyptic world. The Road illustrates how the world was damaged by a global catastrophe. We see a father find hope and his will to live in his son’s innocent sweetness, giving the man his strength to keep going and continue surviving. Through all the many lessons to keep his son alive, and lessons about the world before the apocalypse, one is by far the most important; when he teaches his son to carry the fire. The phrase “carrying the fire” is a metaphor for their will to live, and their drive to keep the hope for humanity alive as well. To the man and the boy, carrying the fire means you are a good

The boy was almost like the angel on his father’s shoulder, preventing him from turning into a “road rat” to keep them alive. During their journey to the coast, the man and the boy have to fight through many hardships to stay alive. One of the more severe occurrences was that of the house where the cannibals lived. The man and the boy saw people “huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands” (McCarthy, page 110). This scene tells us how the cannibals are kidnapping and keeping people alive just to murder them for food. The man found his light through the darkness, and that light was his son. The man says, “He only knew that the child was his warrant” (McCarthy, page 5). The man says often that if the boy were to die, he would die as well to be with his son. It’s almost poetic, the son relies on his father to survive, and the father relies on his son to have the strength to keep going and protect them both.

“Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened light poles whining lightly in the wind” (McCarthy, page 8). McCarthy paints a crystal-clear picture when describing what their world looks like. Mighty fires rage across the earth’s surface. They face an earth where there are no plants, animals, or much of humanity left. They often have to make their way around falling trees and be cautious when earthquakes rack the earth. The father and the son see many horrors of what used to be mankind. On one of their many journeys they saw, “a corpse floating in the black water of a basement among the trash and rusting ductwork” (McCarthy, page 130). Words could not describe what they were forced to go through just to survive.