The Role Of Hope In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

Hope is what makes us different from those who survive just to not die. In his novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy portrays hope as inessential during situations where violence and greed is needed to survive. Emily Dickinson’s perspective of hope is best portrayed given the idea that hope is a feeling that lives within each individual soul; if someone were to ever become ‘hopeless’ it would have been because they have lost the essence of being human, they would be walking earth purposelessly. Cormac McCarthy in his book, The Road, utilizes the post apocalyptic setting in which ‘the boy’ and ‘the man’ are in to provide the reader with a pessimistic portrayal of hope by insinuating that one sometimes does not need hope and may lose it if it is existent . Throughout his novel, McCarthy utilizes the most naive,

Upon curiosity, the boy asks the man what is the bravest thing he has done; to which the man responds, “getting up this morning” (272) after spitting bloody phlegm on the road. The man knows that they boy is the faint spark of hope for whoever could be alive. This boy is so naive and unaware of how inhuman everyone has turned because he was born into this apocalyptic setting where violence and greed seem to be more vital than hope. The man continues walking on the road where so many have lost their lives just so the faint spark of hope does not completely fade away. McCarthy constantly tries to convince the reader that the man is hopeless. However, the man would not decide to wake up every single morning and try so hard to keep the boy’s innocence intact if it were not for the simple fact that he has hope for humanity to re-flourish. With no hope and only eagerness for survival, everyone has become barbarous. The boy and the man arrive at a house where they discover residues of a cannibalism act. “On a mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt”