Yin And Yang In Ernest Hemingway's The Road

The book The Road is filled with horrific events. It seems like the whole book is dark and depressing. The man and the boy are always on the move and constantly looking for a place to rest their heads at night to escape the cold. The man constantly thinks about how he is going to feed the boy and how he will find shelter. It just seems like their suffering never ends. They do come across some bearings of light a of couple times in the book. Darkness is overtaking the man and the boy’s lives, the light can still be found within the book, which can be recognized as Yin and Yang. The Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang can be correlated to the experiences within The Road. “The principle is that all things exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites for example, female-male, dark-light and old-young. The two opposites attract and complement each other as their symbol illustrates, each side has at its core an element of the other” (Mark Cartwright). Yin and Yang is a Chinese Philosophy which states that harmony and balance can only be maintained when both sides of the spectrum exist, and this is shown in The Road plenty of times. The fathers love for the boy balanced the bad events that were occurring within the book. This love wouldn’t have been as strong if they …show more content…
It is the will to carry on, and not give up. Without “the fire”, the balance would be lost, and they wouldn’t be able to continue. This balance is maintained by the struggle that they are going through and fighting against. The world is pushing against them from every corner and bringing them down, which is the opposite side of “the fire”. The dark and light forces are in constant balance in The Road. The balance is met mainly by the fathers love for his son and also the light that shines on the two for brief instances. If you look hard enough you will be able to recognize the Yin and Yang forces at