The Road Cormac Mccarthy Essay

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 …show more content…
The unknown is beautifully established in the vague setting. McCarthy never specifics where the characters are, only give a description of the area there are in but still leaving the mind wandering of the location. ‘’He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years.’’(McCarthy,4). Giving no year or date, never mentioning what country or state, or providing the real names of the characters the writer adds to the theme of a mysterious world, knowing nothing of the future only what is happening to them currently. The unknown is a terrifying thing. It cannot be heard smelt, or touched but can still manage to impact the man and the boy’s life in tremendous ways as well as the plot. The underlying symbolism also creates a intriguing plot as well and keeps the reader thinking and pushes the plot on without directly saying what it means opening a broad spectrum of possibilities of interpretations more specifically the