Lack Of Survival In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, covers the journey of an unnamed man and boy as they travel across the desolate, “charred ruins”, scrounging leftovers of the “vanished world” to postpone the inevitable death invariably looming over the two. As the man and boy struggle to survive in the harsh environment, against the lack of resources, and the “bad guys” who resort to cannibalism, slaughtering and consuming those they find along the road, McCarthy comments on what is good and what is bad in the society and explores how the man and boy are able to remain good. Through the man and boy’s experiences, McCarthy also comments on luck as the man and boy are able to survive on the brink of death. Throughout the course of the novel,

McCarthy continues to elicit this hopeless tone through grim imagery as the man and boy journey down the bleak road and come across “a corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day” (12), further emphasizing the horror of the world that is the man and boy’s reality. McCarthy solidifies these horrors of the present and then drags the man back to his past, filling the past with hope-filled diction such as: “yellow leaves”(13), “aching blue”(18) and “music”(18); utilizing beautiful imagery in a flashback the man has after the man and boy discuss a lake no longer filled with fish, the flashback describing “ a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain… trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air” (20), this memory allowing the man to remember the days when life had color

One instance McCarthy implements to outline this concept is when the man gives the boy a Coca-cola he finds in an ancient supermarket. McCarthy uses the Coca-cola as a hopeful symbol of the man’s past, the Coca-cola giving the man the opportunity to share his past with the boy, allowing them both to briefly escape their reality to dwell in the past. McCarthy further reveals the theme of the importance of not entirely forgetting the past as the man recounts a memory of his wife. In the memory, McCarthy employs peaceful imagery of the “gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes”(19). Preceding the memory, the man says: “Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned”(19), revealing that the man relies on the past to face the cold, dreary world, which McCarthy uses to further the theme that the past should not be utterly forgotten as the past can offer peace and hope in times where peace can not be found in the