In his novel, The Road, author Cormac McCarthy illustrates the good and bad within the world. McCarthy supports this illustration through the use of imagery, symbolism, and connotative diction. McCarthy’s purpose is to explore the insight of a world that has been divided into distinct groups of good vs bad in order to elicit changes of behavior and morals in times of darkness. McCarthy uses a somber tone with his dystopian readers.
McCarthy uses a strong amount of detailed imagery to easily represent and convey the mood and tones of the novel that he is intending to express to his readers. By using this, from early on, McCarthy alludes to the struggles they have to encounter as well as the problems in the world they have to deal with as evidenced in the quote, “He was as burntlooking as the country, his clothing scorched and black. One of his eyes was burnt shut and his hair was but a nitty wig of ash upon his blackened skull… His shoes were bound up with wire and coated with roadtar and he sat there in silence, bent over in his rags. “ (IN TEXT CITATION) Particularly this quote has a strong emphasis behind it due to the fact that McCarthy introduced this burning man as being one of the first humans the man and boy encounter. Instead of using strong, meaningful words, the author could have used simple words that would not evoke as much power to the reading in describing what the man looked like. With using imagery, the reader gets an enhanced, disturbed feeling of what the