The Road By Cormac Mccarthy: Movie Analysis

Improved Essays
You may have seen or read a scary, gruesome, , gut wrenching movie or novel, but nothing compares to the novel or film of “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. This horrifying fiction is above anything you can imagine. This fiction really portrays humanity as dark and pessimism throughout the whole thing.
To start it off, The whole first page of the novel instantly reveals its deep and dark sense. Like one of the first sentences in the first page start out with “nights beyond darkness and days more gray each one than what had gone before”(3). This really already sets the mood and puts a clear image in your head of what you're diving into. Deeper in the book it really never gets any better than that. If anything it gets worse in some parts that I will

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    As a method of coping, humans seek out the attention of others and look to them for support. Maia Szalavitz, a journalist for TIME.com writes “the more connections we have and the stronger our bonds are to each other, the more likely we are to survive, not just physically but emotionally”. Hardships become easier to endure when connecting with people or groups who have experienced similar emotions. As mentioned previously, Cormac McCarthy admirably grasped this concept in his novel The Road when he introduced father and son into a harsh dystopian atmosphere. Early on it is evident that these characters cannot survive without each other: Cameron 2…

    • 273 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy is about a father and his son trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world where all that is left is ash and death. They spend the novel traveling south to the coast in order to improve their chances of survival through the impending winter. Throughout the novel they act as pilgrims exploring the new world left behind by the catastrophic event that has rendered the world ultimately void of all life aside from a few humans, most of which have abandoned their morality in favor of a more animalistic survival instinct. The destination of this journey is to reach the coast, but it is the adaptation and replacement of what humanity used to be into what it is now that the book emphasizes. This change is shown…

    • 1289 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) follows the journey of a father and a son as they walk through post-apocalyptic America. This new world is filled with nothing by solemn skies, death, and ash. On the road the pair stays away from the bad guys while hunting for rare food sources. The young boy is hopeful in this new world and helps the father believe that the worst is over.…

    • 635 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Dark Side of Innocence The world is filled with desperation, where survival and self-reliance is the only way to live, and every minute, every second, and every single breath is precious. In an apocalyptic situation, wherein one’s survival is the priority, McCarthy reveals a repentant and ashamed tone towards the evil deeds humans are essentially forced to do for their own survival. In the novel The Road, author Cormac McCarthy utilized forthright diction and significant details to epitomize an apologetic tone when discussing the loss of innocence through one’s lifetime, proving that despite mankind being innately innocent, greed overpowers and induces humanity to eventually lose their purity.…

    • 1116 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    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…

    • 1513 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Road Cormac Mccarthy

    • 1419 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In The Road, Cormac McCarthy shows how family and love can lead a person through their hard times. He reveals how family and love helps and inspires one to overcome obstacles that are unfamiliar to them. A boy who has dealt with the worst of the worst by losing his mother in a horrific way is left alone with his father. At a young age he is taught everything he needs to survive by only one parent. His father teaches him that there are others around still after a disaster that nearly erased the human race and that those people are “bad guys”.…

    • 1419 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Decent Essays

    The road that is written by Cormac McCarthy, an American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize, and it takes place over the apocalyptic risky world. McCarthy shows how the woman, the man wife, plays important role in the man thinking and dreaming, so he makes the reader understand the way of the woman thinking and situations that she experienced. The woman does not want to keep her baby, the boy, in the beginning because she felt scary from the dangerous world. It is hard for any woman to think about bot keeping her baby, but in the woman situation it could be understandable why she does not want to keep the baby. The woman experiences the lack of foods and waters, and she does not want her baby to experience the worst.…

    • 242 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    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.…

    • 990 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Imagine being alone and trying to survive with no food, shelter, and marauders and cannibals waiting for you to cross their path. Cormac McCarthy confronts these fears in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road. Released on September 26 2006, this novel has been opening the reader’s eyes to what the reality of survival looks like. An unexplained catastrophe has turned the world into bunt, sparse land that is now home to only a few humans and dogs. The main characters are an unnamed man and his young son, who are traveling south across America to reach warmer weather.…

    • 1664 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Road Hope Analysis

    • 995 Words
    • 4 Pages

    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.…

    • 995 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    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…

    • 665 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Road is full of various symbols and images as the online book reviewer Ted Gioia stated in his review "The landscape—always important in setting the atmosphere in McCarthy’s books—hardly more inviting than a battlefield or the dark side of the moon"(Gioia, 2008). The most noticeable symbol would be the "fire" which has a total different meaning than in Miller's novel, the man several times throughout the novel mentions it to his son "You have to carry the fire. I dont know how to. Yes you do. Is it real?…

    • 797 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy, follows the journey of survival of the Man and the Boy in a burnt world covered in ash. To escape the incoming cold weather, they decide to head down south to the coast. With nothing but a pistol, a cart of supplies, and each other, they must cope with hunger, thirst, and the dangers of the land. Along the way, they experience close encounters with bands of cannibals who either will try to enslave or kill them. Throughout the novel, the son, afraid of becoming one of the cannibals or “bad guys,” questions whether they remain the “good guys” whenever the father does something morally questionable to ensure their survival.…

    • 1617 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    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.…

    • 1534 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    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.…

    • 1302 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays