Cormac McCarthy

Chigurh Rush Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men provides an interesting take on a seemingly endless dispute between appearances and reality as seen through the character of Anton Chigurh. Throughout the novel McCarthy presents Chigurh as a relentless killer. However, a closer look into this perplexing character shows that Anton Chigurh uses his convoluted moral code to ensure that no crime goes unpunished. Although Chigurh is labelled a psychotic hit man, his dexterity allows him to pursue…

There may be many situations where survival plays the key role. In The Road by Cormac Mccarthy survival plays a big role but not the main. A man and his son carry the fire throughout the book. In the road the world everyone once knew had turned to a wasteland. A world where there is no authority and cannibals run the streets. However, there is one man and one boy who represent the good left in humanity. They believe that there is still good humanity elsewhere; though it is tough to remain sane…

Whether the main characters are survivors, or “the walking dead in a horror film” (Cormac McCarthy 55), they are “carrying the fire” (McCarthy 129) within themselves on a journey in hope to recover the civilization that had vanished in the world of depravity. McCarthy’s The Road follows the journey of a father and young boy who travel the path of a road that leads to nowhere, searching to find a way to renew the faith in humanity after an unexplained apocalypse. The setting of the apocalypse was…

Cormac McCarthy has a decently extensive vocabulary in his book The Road. One word he chooses to use is firedrake. Although the term technically means a fire-breathing dragon, typically from Greek mythology, McCarthy uses it in a metaphor. The man is watching his son gather wood and stoke the fire, and he refers to him as “God’s own firedrake,” (31). Of course, he does not literally mean his son is a fire-breathing dragon in this context, but rather that his son is carrying the fire they are…

the future. People wonder if they, their children or even grandchildren will grow up in a safe, peaceful society. The Dystopian genre in fiction introduces a devastating turn on the future of the world in which no sane person would enjoy living in. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road delivers a compelling sense of misery in it’s shattered, dark atmosphere. The book focuses on describing it’s horrific world, developing it’s few characters, and adding warnings, which are all elements of Dystopian novels. A…

Conflict of Morality in The Road In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the main characters are in constant conflict over their different views of the world and how they should treat other people. The conflict between the man and the boy is because of their individual stand on morality. In this essay, I am going to discuss two different instances where the man and the boy are provided with a means to cause conflict within their relationship due to their personal views on morality. These two instances…

shotgun upside down over his shoulder on a braided leather lanyard and wore a nylon bandolier filled with shells for the gun. A veteran of old skirmishes, bearded, scarred across his cheek and the bone stoven and the one eye wandering.” (Page 237) Cormac was describing what the man was wearing and how he looked. This part occurs at the end of the book • Metaphor "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling…

There are those who have what it takes to survive in a post-apocalyptic world and there are those who cannot. Women are those that cannot survive in a world of cruelty and danger unless heavily supported by men. In the novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, a father and son struggle to survive in the United States years after a mass extinction event. The two follow a road south in hopes of finding food and warmth, staying careful not to wander into the presence of other humans hoping to use their…

La Rochefoucauld’s axiom , “Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily “ The sun is something that is in our lives regardless of where we are in the world , we don’t always seem to look at it because it will irritate our eyes if we look at it for too long . Death does not hurt our eyes but hurts us in a way where we feel different emotionally .When we see death it creates pain just as the sun would create pain onto our vision. Death is something that happens in life but it’s not…

overly repetitive. This brings us to the question at stake; How could The Road be read and interpreted differently by two different readers? Both the critical and public success of the novel is a result of its positioning in space and time. Cormac McCarthy has set the novel in a post-apocalyptic world with the only hints of time and place being; The coke can and the billboard that reads, ‘Welcome to Rock City’,…