In a bleak, monochromatic wasteland, a “banished sun circles the Earth like a grieving mother with a lamp” (32). For the inhabitants of this barren, post-apocalyptic world, man’s bravest feat is waking up in the morning—mornings that are met not with symphonic sparrows and songs of the world’s awakening, but with the all-encompassing reality of loss. Nights are “dark beyond darkness,” and the dawning of each new day promises a progressive descent into grey (1). Nature is an impoverished mother: unable to provide for her children or even for herself. Starvation is a constant state as vagabonds traverse the labyrinthine paths before them, knowing they are on the road to nowhere but trudging forward nonetheless. Some call Cormac McCarthy’s The
…show more content…
“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him,” (1). This act is the ultimate affirmation of hope—asserting that, even in a state of complete disarray, the world has not lost the human connection that is woven into its very fabric. Were the novel truly hopeless, Papa would have reached for something else in this opening scene: food, a lantern, an extra layer perhaps. But instead, he reaches for his son. Where love is instinctual, hope persists.
Similarly, were the world entirely overrun by the cannibals that march through sections of The Road, hope certainly would join all of Earth’s animals on the extinction list. But for all these marauders, all these cannibals and rapists and pillagers, there is also Papa: tucking his son into bed each night, scavenging for him, bathing him, comforting him, teaching him, talking to him, protecting him—reaching out to him upon the dawning of first light. One man, the novel asserts, makes all the difference—proving that even in the darkest of times, to be human still means to be …show more content…
But when we view The Road as an affirmation of hope, the novel’s ending adopts a different meaning entirely. There is no denying that the world as we know it has been lost to man—it is a “thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” Yet, hope remains; in the streams are trout: resonant symbols of renewal in barren wastelands. The world, insists the text, is in a perpetual state of “becoming.” There was a world before man (“in the deep glens where [the trout] lived all things were older than man...”) and there will be one long after we have departed from this
“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him,” (1). This act is the ultimate affirmation of hope—asserting that, even in a state of complete disarray, the world has not lost the human connection that is woven into its very fabric. Were the novel truly hopeless, Papa would have reached for something else in this opening scene: food, a lantern, an extra layer perhaps. But instead, he reaches for his son. Where love is instinctual, hope persists.
Similarly, were the world entirely overrun by the cannibals that march through sections of The Road, hope certainly would join all of Earth’s animals on the extinction list. But for all these marauders, all these cannibals and rapists and pillagers, there is also Papa: tucking his son into bed each night, scavenging for him, bathing him, comforting him, teaching him, talking to him, protecting him—reaching out to him upon the dawning of first light. One man, the novel asserts, makes all the difference—proving that even in the darkest of times, to be human still means to be …show more content…
But when we view The Road as an affirmation of hope, the novel’s ending adopts a different meaning entirely. There is no denying that the world as we know it has been lost to man—it is a “thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” Yet, hope remains; in the streams are trout: resonant symbols of renewal in barren wastelands. The world, insists the text, is in a perpetual state of “becoming.” There was a world before man (“in the deep glens where [the trout] lived all things were older than man...”) and there will be one long after we have departed from this