The Theme Of Hope In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

In the novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s tracks the journey of a man and boy through an unknown wasteland to an undisclosed destination. It is evident that there has been a catastrophic disaster that has obliterated the land. Skeletons and corpses line the road they travel. The reader never knows where the man and boy are going. There is a foreboding sense of resignation. very few proper names are used, the location of the story in unknown, female characbters are scarce with the exception of the boy’s mother who is only present for a brief period at the beginning of the novel. McCarthy’s writing style is minimalistic. There is an absence of stylistic writing tools. The book has no chapters and very little punctuation is used. The reader never really knows where the characters are going; but, it is evident that the journey is horrific. Some critics say that the concept of hope is nonexistent in The Road. Hope does exist, but not as a constructive or pleasing …show more content…
Early in the story, the mother could only hope for “everlasting nothingness” because if she were to hope for something better, she knew that her dreams would be destroyed and that would be more painful than death. When the threat of harm to the boy became so great, the man’s only hope for the boy was to teach him how to kill himself with his gun. In this scene, the only hope for the father is to know that his son could pull the trigger to be saved from the horror of the world. Hope, as something constructive or positive, does not exist in The Road. Even when the man and boy stumble across good fortune along their journey any good feelings are short lived. They continue on in the midst of death and decay and hope turns into death and destruction. In McCarthy’s novel, hope does exist, but not as a constructive or pleasing objective, but rather as an alternate form of