Alienation In American Literature

THEME OF SURVIVAL IN CORMAC MCCARTHY’S “THE ROAD”

INTRODUCTION

In the development of American Literature, the American novel has played a very important role in the establishment of American characteristics, and the breadth of its production now cause it to be considered a separate path and tradition. The New England colonies were the centre of early American literature. Henry David wrote Walden, which stresses on the resistance to the dictates of on organized society. American novels focus on the landscape of the country, America. They portrayed poverty, survival, hunger, alienation and cultural conflicts in their novels. Many of the American writers expressed disillusionment following the World War. The stories and novels of F.R.Scott Fitzgerald capture the mood of the 1920s, and John Dos Passes wrote about the war. Hemingway became notable for The Sun Also Raises and A Farwell to Arms. According to Richard Chase, The American novel was born out of cultural contradiction. Its genesis lies in the aesthetic possibilities of radical forms of alienation, contradiction and disorder. American literature reached a new height of perfection and depth of meaning in this period. Critics like Malcolm Cowley and Edmund

Cormac Mccarthy’s novel Road post-apocalyptic. He describes the sufferings of the characters in the novel. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of the civilization and in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth. Many of the remaining human survivors have resorted to cannibalism, scavenging the city and country for