Isolation In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

People change. People adapt to the situation at hand, whether it’s a good or bad change depends on the person. In The Road there is a post apocalyptic world and Cormac McCarthy wants to show many different types of these people, the good, the bad, the ugly. Throughout the book a man and his son try to survive the apocalypse, but in turn end up confronting some terrible persons. These people have become that way in order to survive in a dangerous and changing society. Cormac shows through The Road human’s reaction to isolation and a bad society can be quite different as seen by the mother, the father and son, and the other groups.

The mother although she wasn’t in a majority of the novel the readers understood quite clearly that she had

It is clear that the father loves his son more than he loves anything else in the world. Many times throughout the book Cormac shows this love, but the most meaningful showing is on the first page. When the father had “woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him”(1). The father’s first thought the minute he wakes up is if his son is okay, always there and always looking out for him. Maybe if society had not turned to this isolation the father would not have to watch out for his boy so much. Isolation can bring out the best in people, like the boy’s constant desire to not become like the bad guys that eat people. When they boy and his father are going to sleep after a long day the boy asks the dad “Are we still the good guys?”, in which the father reassuringly responds yes(77). The kid is worried about becoming bad and becoming what the other people are like, which is a good mentality because no human should succumb to what the groups are doing. The father and son have an unspoken pact, this pact is that if one dies the other will too. This is expressed by the father when he says “that you won’t survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far”(49). He basically just said

The boy and the man run into many problems throughout the book, most involving some screwed up people. After running into these people the boy, worried, asks this question “We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?” and the father in turn answers “No. Of course not.” Unlike the father and son this group of people have gone rotten, they lack normal human characteristics such as sympathy. Not only did they run into cannibals though, but also thieves. People who do not have a heart, and would steal everything off and old man and a little boy just to postpone his death a little longer. Death is a constant theme in the novel, it’s what everyone want or what everyone is trying to avoid. Not all people can be like the boy who wants to save people and continue on living. The father talks with an old man and he asks him if he wants to die and the old man responds saying, “No. It's foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these.” The old man claims that death is a luxury, some people react to isolation in different