The Road Mccarthy Analysis

McCarthy in The Road and Trethewey in Native Guard both struggle with the ambiguity of legacy after death, searching for a purpose in mortality and for a way to entwine one’s existence with the rest of history to create progress. However, McCarthy, writing about the apocalypse in The Road, does not specifically focus on the mortality of humans, but the mortality of morality itself, the slow death of the goodness of people. Each author deals with the concept of legacy after death--McCarthy with a father’s noble sacrifice for humanity’s redemption and Trethewey with her mother’s murder and the forgotten history of the Native Guards--to demonstrate two concepts: the prevalence of mortality and the fragility of legacy as it is completely dependent on the memories and acknowledgement of others. Essentially, death is a journey. A soul will embark upon a quest into the unfathomable darkness and its legacy is left behind. As “the real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge” and legacy is a determinant of history, the …show more content…
After the murder of her mother, Natasha Trethewey struggles with the fragility of legacy, the fleeting existences of humans that could potentially be lost in time. In her poem “Providence,” Trethewey illuminates the prevalence of mortality--the constancy of an death--in the context of a hurricane. In the face of the destruction in the aftermath of the hurricane, “[her] reflection disappeared, trembled when [she] bent to touch it,” which highlights the fleeting existence of life, fleeting because it could be torn away in a single instant (Trethewey 42). The trembling reflection is metaphorically representative of the fragility of legacy--in the face of mortality, legacy is left to the abstract concept of human