A Road for Two Imagine losing every material possession once held dear, only to be placed in a world all too dark, desolate, and dead. Pain and suffering become a new normal as a grasp on uncertain life loosens and hope becomes a treasured rarity. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a touching tale, mirroring the aforementioned circumstance with a poetic and realistic nature. A man and his young boy are the two main characters, unencumbered by others and remaining nameless throughout the entire book. The story is told through the narrator’s perspective, but glimpses of the father’s perception appear. The boy and the man are living in a gray, empty, and lifeless post-apocalyptic world, journeying together to give life worth and purpose. They
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Throughout the novel, it is clear that the father and the boy are each other’s world. While most are turning to suicide or corruption, they ground each other and remain kind-hearted and sane. While their obstacles seem impossible to overcome, the beauty in their journey illumines their bond and its role in the story. Amazingly, they allow love to fuel hope, not hopelessness to fuel hate. Despite complete hopelessness, heartbreaking loss, and the overwhelming demands of survival, the father and son’s true bond of love in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road remains unbreakable. Even though hopelessness is a devastating feeling commonly found in the novel, the relationship that the father and son share overpowers it. For one thing, the sheer essence of a post-apocalyptic world motivates a loss of hope. No one is able to escape the grasp of starvation, the spectacle of fire and emptiness that span across the land, and the sight of the roads scattered with dead bodies belonging to those who have given up. It seems impossible to survive because there is simply nothing left. The crushing picture of the world the boy and man …show more content…
To illustrate, the man has a point of realization that he is not capable of helping the boy truly comprehend the extent of what has been lost. The belief is explained when the narrator writes, “[The father] could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was the ashes of his own” (McCarthy 154). The boy was born after the apocalypse, so he only knows shades of gray and emptiness. He has no way of understanding the pleasures of life before the devastation, no matter how descriptive the father tries to be. For instance, the boy never experiences eating a warm plate of food with his family all together at a dinner table. He never has the chance to go outside and play without harboring fear of what lurks. All of the luxuries in life, he never has a chance to experience. There is no way he can fully understand something that he has never seen or done. The loss of what the boy could have known is heartbreaking to the father, but together they give life a new meaning and fill it with new joys. All that was lost is forgotten because they know that each other is all they need. In a similar way, the man faces a loss. His wife shoots herself. He begs and cries for her to stay, but she is not strong enough to carry on. Afterward, the narrator utters, “The boy was all that stood between him and death” (McCarthy
Throughout the novel, it is clear that the father and the boy are each other’s world. While most are turning to suicide or corruption, they ground each other and remain kind-hearted and sane. While their obstacles seem impossible to overcome, the beauty in their journey illumines their bond and its role in the story. Amazingly, they allow love to fuel hope, not hopelessness to fuel hate. Despite complete hopelessness, heartbreaking loss, and the overwhelming demands of survival, the father and son’s true bond of love in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road remains unbreakable. Even though hopelessness is a devastating feeling commonly found in the novel, the relationship that the father and son share overpowers it. For one thing, the sheer essence of a post-apocalyptic world motivates a loss of hope. No one is able to escape the grasp of starvation, the spectacle of fire and emptiness that span across the land, and the sight of the roads scattered with dead bodies belonging to those who have given up. It seems impossible to survive because there is simply nothing left. The crushing picture of the world the boy and man …show more content…
To illustrate, the man has a point of realization that he is not capable of helping the boy truly comprehend the extent of what has been lost. The belief is explained when the narrator writes, “[The father] could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was the ashes of his own” (McCarthy 154). The boy was born after the apocalypse, so he only knows shades of gray and emptiness. He has no way of understanding the pleasures of life before the devastation, no matter how descriptive the father tries to be. For instance, the boy never experiences eating a warm plate of food with his family all together at a dinner table. He never has the chance to go outside and play without harboring fear of what lurks. All of the luxuries in life, he never has a chance to experience. There is no way he can fully understand something that he has never seen or done. The loss of what the boy could have known is heartbreaking to the father, but together they give life a new meaning and fill it with new joys. All that was lost is forgotten because they know that each other is all they need. In a similar way, the man faces a loss. His wife shoots herself. He begs and cries for her to stay, but she is not strong enough to carry on. Afterward, the narrator utters, “The boy was all that stood between him and death” (McCarthy