Cormac Mccarthy Elements Of The Road

‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy, effectively communicates McCarthy’s values and beliefs to position the audience to accept his views on survival, he does this through biographical context, characterisation, symbolism, style and structure. McCarthy’s novel is clearly influenced by biographical context which includes his relationship with his son and the fact that he spent lots of time at the Santa Fe institute in New Mexico where world scientists and thinkers study the complex systems of the world. How his relationship with his son affected how the novel was written. This was because it was written in first person and when the father died it changed to third person of the son’s point of view. The fact that McCarthy spent lots of time at the Santa Fe institute was the main reason why the novel was made as a post-apocalyptic fiction because; of how the institute studies complex problems of our time and how apocalyptic fiction is typically portrayed as being due to a …show more content…
The language features and structures that contribute to the authors view on survival are symbolism, style and structure. The main symbolism McCarthy uses in his novel is ‘carrying the fire’. This undoubtedly one of the main symbols he uses throughout the novel, “You can’t, You have to carry the fire.” (pg 298) The father says the son has to “carry the fire” he does this so the son has a sense of belonging and feels powerful by carrying an imaginary fire within. The structure that he uses is very effectively used by making the novel not have any chapters and no grammar it shows the reader that in a post-apocalyptic society that nothing has a use any more. The style that he uses to write the novel makes it more effectively written because he writes the novel in third person from both the father and the son’s point of view. But after the father dies he changes the writing to first person from the perspective of the