The Road Cormac Mccarthy

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”. He taught him how to survive even after he told his son to kill himself with a gun and he couldn’t let that happen. He shows him that people were killing their own and eating them and that he should never …show more content…
The boy asks his father what he would do if he died. “What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you”(McCarthy 11). This portrays how the boy’s father would act if he died and how he would act upon the situation. His father tells him that if he dies then he would die too just to be with him. The father can’t see his life without his son and that he would follow him wherever he would go even if it would be to die. The father shows the his son how to survive by looking around. “Canned vegetables and fruit and moldering grain and their staples, along with brackish water”(Hand). This quote relates to how the boy is being taught how to survive by his father and how he can keep going when the point comes for his father to leave. They will find these essentials and share them in order to …show more content…
The father tells his son that if anyone ever tries to take him away from himself the he will kill that person. “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?”(McCarthy 77). This portrays how after the father kills the crazy man who tries to attack and kidnap his son, he will attack anyone who even lays their hand on him. His job had become to protect his son from anyone or anything in their path. The father is not like the others. “They really are the good guys”(Hand). This quote relates to how the man tries to kidnap the man’s son and how he might have tried to eat him. The people around were eating their own and the man wanted to avoid people like that form here on and protect the son, while the son protects him. This is a reason they are good people because they look after each other than to try to kill each other and eat the other