They believed that only people who hold morals and maintain sane were the one who carried the fire. This is shown by the son being occupied with themselves being the “good guy” because they were “carrying the fire.” He even believes a complete stranger after hearing a positive answer to his question: “Are you carrying the fire?” However, I want to see this “fire” little differently. I believe that everybody in this post-apocalyptic world carries their own fire and the fire in this context would signify the will to live.…
In “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy the world that is constructed shows the difference of good and evil by creating two groups of good guys and bad guys. According to the father him an the boy are the “good guys” basically the bad stuff they do is okay because they are the good guys. They are only doing things that would be considered bad to protect themselves. When the father kills someone it's because the guy was bad and would of hurt his son., “___the man said “you think i won't kill you but you're wrong”…
Religion Without faith, life has no meaning. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Papa and the boy journey through a post-apocalyptic time where they seem to have no purpose, but they still carry the fire and keep going. Faith in God provides purpose and hope, even when all has been lost. A life without faith is a life without purpose. The man, “Knew only that only that the child was his warrant.…
Food: the most necessary supplement to life. There are few experiences that can best biting into a perfectly grilled steak, or savoring the first bite of a warm apple pie. In times of low energy, these dishes and many others step up perfectly to reinvigorate the tired person. Why, then, for most of history, has food been consumed raw? Richard Wrangham explores the notion of cooking and how it led to the evolution of the hominin ancestors into modern humans in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.…
John’s Journey The main character in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is John Grady Cole, a sixteen year-old runaway cowboy. John Grady is not the typical teenager of the time period of the novel which happens to be nineteen forty-nine. John Grady sees himself as a cowboy who does not need unnecessary technology like cars when you have horses. The world is modernizing and, cowboys are gradually disappearing.…
In the book The Road by Cormac McCarthy one question seems to appear in just about everyone’s life. One of life and death. Some say yes, some say no, and some do not know. But, this question if it is worth living constantly pops up throughout the book. McCarthy first presents this question through the mother of the boy in a flashback.…
Throughout history, women have fought for gender equality economically, socially, and opportunity wise. Women have tried to show that, in a multitude of occasions, females are just as capable of being successful and heroic like their male counterparts. The book The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, demonstrates feminist literary criticism by portraying women as property and puppets of men. The book, about a boy and his father who undergo obstacles after the destruction of civilization show through Feminist Criticism, the lowest form of feminist criticism. Thus, allowing us to see how male-dominated the book is and how minimal women were portrayed.…
In the final moments of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy the son’s father dies from presumably, a lung cancer. I am questioning weather the son and his “new” family were going to live or die within the next year, after the sons dad dies. The first option I am going to talk about is weather the son is going to live. Some reasons they are going to win is that the son and dad killed off the blood cult. With no cult there is a great chance of surviving.…
Throughout the novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the geographical, cultural, and physical surroundings help shape the morality of the little boy. The Road takes place during a post-apocalyptic world, in which morals and humanity is questioned through the actions of cannibals, rapists, and murderers. The man and the boy go on a quest that carries on throughout the novel to head further down south in hopes of finding warmer weather. As Thomas C. Foster stated in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, “the real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge” (Foster 3). Every quest is composed of five basic elements; a questor, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials, and the real reason to go to that destination.…
The man and the son fear that they are no better than what is left from their society and McCarthy uses the motif of fire as a way to exemplify that and as a way to symbolize…
The award-winning novel, The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy, portrays the man’s unconditional love for his son in the post-apocalyptic world. At first glance, the novel portrays a hopeless, desolate ambience and elements of despair seem to greatly outweigh elements of hope throughout the novel. Upon further analysis of the text, it is evident that McCarthy uses symbols to portray unconditional love and hope, thus making The Road a novel of hope. Throughout the novel, there is a constant battle between good and bad.…
In post-apocalyptic stories, the world is portrayed in a disastrous and devastating form. The death of animals or human beings would be such a normal phenomenon under the circumstance, and everything is saturated with sadness and desperation. However, there is usually still a small number of survivors who demonstrate love and morality, being the last hope of humanity. In The Road written by Cormac McCarthy, the survived father and son are two typical examples of this idea. They show love and kindness to each other and the people they meet.…
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel that diverges from the customary standards regarding format of how a novel is written. McCarthy tends to ignore the usage of quotations and apostrophes and also writes in a splintered fashion especially in the beginning of the book adding the tone of minimalistic times. He never reveals the name of the characters and only refers to them as The Boy and The Man as it is written in third person omniscient though it often seems as if the novel was written in first person which adds to the idiosyncrasy of the novel. On the contrary The Road is extremely detail oriented which immensely contributes to the overall theme and tone of the book in addition to putting the reader in the characters shoes. The Road is a fiction piece about a post apocalyptic desolated world centered around a boy and a man trying to fight through constant fear and inhumane…
The Road by Cormac McCarthy In The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a third person narrative follows the story of a father and son that live in a post-apocalyptic world filled with danger and life threatening situations. McCarthy demonstrates the parental role between the man and the boy, where the boy influences the man by showing him that there is good left in the world. He uses the reality of their world, the contemplation of suicide, the times where they could have died and the boy as the last true influence of good to portray the significance of the boy to his father. The reality of the world that the two characters live in as presented by McCarthy is dangerous.…
Throughout pieces of literature, whether novels or short stories, imagery is an important literary device. Without the addition of imagery, readers would not be able to have emotional or sensational responses. In the interesting story of “The Road”, by Cormac McCarthy, readers encounter several situations where imagery is a prominent element which helps paint a better overall understand of the setting, plot and characters. Early on in “The Road”, readers are faced with a father and son looking to get to the coast in a post-apocalyptic United States. The two are looking to find a warm area to evade the freezing winters of the North, but must endure several weeks of hardships and horrors.…