The thick line between humanity and savagery that is portrayed by the formation of civilization is nothing but an illusion. As seen in the book, The Road, the line that separates humanity and savagery is in reality paper thin. Through the use of a post apocalyptic setting, Cormac McCarthy manipulates the sense of humanity through the bare primitive survival instincts the individuals living in the ruins of the world must adapt in order to survive. The fall of civilization presented the survivors the choice of staying within the realms of humanity or to fall the victim to savagery.
Throughout the novel, the man struggles to motivate himself and his son. He sometimes invokes the notion of carrying the fire in order to reassure the child. “Nothing bad is going to happen to us. That’s right. Because we’re carrying the fire.
The skies are grey, it’s freezing, and everything is covered by ash, this is reality now. Cormac McCarthy, playwright, screenwriter and the author of The Road, gives us a glimpse of the struggle of living in a catastrophe world. The story of The Road, is about the hardship between a father and son living in an apocalyptic wasteland. Throughout the story we see how differently the father and son act in the situation they encounter.
In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the significance of truth is what the boy has come to believe along their journey, which is that himself and his father are the “good guys” and the people they encounter along the road are the “bad guys”. Throughout the book the boy continuously asks his father things like “are we still the good guys?” and “were they the bad guys?” and his father continues to give him validation and goes on to tell him that they are the good guys and everyone else they see is bad. I feel that throughout the story the boy comes to realize that they are not the good guys because he sees the way his father treats those innocent people that they have encountered, but he thinks it is necessary that he believes him and his father are
To Change is to Grow Through the book “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy the boy and the father show a great amount of change and maturity, while also learning to adapt and love. The story has a good balance of how different events can affect and impact someone's life in either a good or bad way. There are many events that change the mind and heart of the boy and father, but change can only be helpful if you learn from it and mature out of being afraid for things to happen. The stories main idea is very tragic in a dark, grey world where nothing ever good happens and instead of learning to live your preparing to die.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a post apocalyptic story about a father and son’s journey to the south. It is set in mid 20th century America. The desolate land is covered by a thick layer of ashy clouds, causing the temperature to drop. At the start, we find the Father and Son sleeping in a wooded area. They begin their journey on the ash covered road.
McCarthy’s book, The Road, is a story of survival and love between a father and son. Even though this story is based on the future, throughout the pages it feels like the story is actually happening. Human existence can be determined in many aspects and even though humans are evolved more than most creatures, in the end we are still mammals. The apocalypse can have many metaphors to paint a picture in one’s mind. In The Road, the word usage to describe the apocalypse is grey, death and fire.
In the 2006 novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a man and his son struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Told through a lens of constant hardship, the book follows their arduous journey towards a coast in order to survive the winter. Throughout the novel, McCarthy shows that having hope enables people to persevere in dire circumstances because it counteracts the possibility of negative outcomes. First, the woman’s monologue about her death displays the despair necessary to abandon all hope.
“If morality is extinguished, there is no human being left,” Gitta Sereny answered, when asked about her personal beliefs on human morals. Sereny, a famous journalist and writer, was famous for her outlook and interviews on controversial people, including a child murderer of the 60s, Mary Bell. Bell was only eleven years old when she took the lives of two toddler aged boys. Sereny was an expert of Mary Bell’s case, a girl who seemed to have no care of other humans. She noted how a person with no morality behaved, resulting in the previous quote.
In an apocalyptic world, a man is searching for hope as he tries to protect his son. In the Bible, Abraham is left searching for faith as God commands him to kill his only son, Isaac. The man and Abraham are both searching for something that they do not possess and they both look to their children to find it. Cormac McCarthy in The Road tells a story of a man’s mental and physical journey as he travels south to protect his son, but along the way he encounters internal battles within himself and contemplates if there is enough hope to continue. Author Alan Noble argues in his essay that hope is the driving force for the man and boy’s survival, which we agree with.