Cormac Mccarthy The Road Analysis

The ember flickers and smoulders in the breeze, blackening the wood, illuminating the ravaged landscape in a post-apocalyptic world of decay. Fire sometimes is seen as a destructive weapon devouring everything in its path. However, in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, fire not only maintains the father and his son’s lives under harsh natural condition but also acts as a beacon of hope and goodness on the father and his son’s journey toward the south. McCarthy repeats the idea of “carrying the fire” many times throughout the novel to symbolize the inextinguishable hope in their heart, which propels them to physically fight against nature, keep their morality intact and inherit the civilization of humanity that once has collapsed.
At the beginning …show more content…
Beyond hope, carrying the fire can be seen as a mission to carry the imprint of mankind left in the void. When the old man meets the boy, he expresses that “I haven’t seen a fire in a long time, that’s all. I live like an animal...When I saw that boy I thought that I had died” (172). The simile compares his life without fire to a wild life of an animal and this beastial imagery of the old man connotes that humans seem to no longer exist. The rest of the world is filled with violent and barbaric creatures, and yet, the appearance of the little boy with sparks inside proves the existence of humanity. The human civilization can only be recovered through the efforts of the boy because he is the only descendant with a soul as well as the “good guy”, who still possesses the virtues and obeys the moral codes of the former society under the pressure of starvation and evil threats. The boy’s goodness is highlighted by the repetition of being sympathetic to strangers or menaces throughout the book, since no matter how dangerous the situation they are in, the boy always has faith in people’s innate kindness. The father also recognizes that as shown in the conversation with the boy before his