The Road

Every Trip is a Quest: The Road to Self-Knowledge A road leads to a destination. In How To Read Literature like a Professor, Thomas Foster advises “When a character hits the road, we should start to pay attention, just to see if, you know, something’s going on there” (6). Given that Cormac McCarthy titled his novel, The Road, Foster provides a “heads-up” that something special is about to happen. The challenge is to dig beneath the surface, and discover the underlying gem hidden by the…

Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, shows how a young boy grows to be independent. This makes me believe that McCarthy’s novel is a coming-of-age story. Through various aspects of his novel, McCarthy shows how humans are hybridized; we are a mix between dependency and autonomy and that determines our identity. As we learn, grow, and mature, we must find a balance between the spectrum of independence and community. In The Road, the boy was depicted as dependent on the father. If the boy needed…

A Road for Two Imagine losing every material possession once held dear, only to be placed in a world all too dark, desolate, and dead. Pain and suffering become a new normal as a grasp on uncertain life loosens and hope becomes a treasured rarity. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a touching tale, mirroring the aforementioned circumstance with a poetic and realistic nature. A man and his young boy are the two main characters, unencumbered by others and remaining nameless throughout the entire…

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 must in Dystopian…

Commentary Outline - The Road Not Taken Introduction: The poem, The Road Not Taken, written by Robert Frost centers around the speaker who is Frost himself. It is an autobiographical poem that centers around a young man who is deciding his path in life and for his future, yet is indecisive as to which path to take. The speaker develops the theme of identity through decisions in life and conveys the message that the decisions chosen affect one’s future path and identity in life. Within this…

The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel about a nameless father and son who are traveling to the coast in the south. The author, Cormac McCarthy, neglects to inform the reader as to the causes of the apocalypse but it is inferred that it was caused by man. The nameless son was born in this world, not knowing what a pre-apocalyptic world was like but only knowing the drained world he was born into. Before the son’s mother committed suicide due to the extreme environment their family was put in, she…

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, disregards many standards put in place by other writers. None of the characters have proper names, dialogue is not put in quotes, and the characters are not complex. Complex means that the character goes through some sort of change. It’s a very common literary element. In this story there are two main characters and neither of them have an apparent change in personality throughout the book. The Road seems to have no complex characters whatsoever, and that’s a…

positive part of obstacles in our lives. The speaker is the Robert Frost, who is the poet of the poem On a Tree Fallen across the Road. Explain what the quote says in your own words The quote tells us that we cannot experience positive experiences such as success and learning without experiencing difficulties, such as a failure.…

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a story between the protagonists, a father and his son, versus a post-apocalyptic world. The father and son leave their house after the wife shoots herself and heads south, where it is warmer. Throughout their journey, they meet survivors whom the father does not trust and it shows. Some of the survivors are terrible people who eat other people or murder others and some are thieves who are forced to steal to survive such as the thief who tried to steal the cart…

world left with nothing, words are basically all the man and son have remaining. Hence, In this sense, the word "okay" serves as a "signature" on a verbal contract. The father and son agree, "There is no other deal. This is it. Okay. Okay"(165). On the road, there are no remnants of handshakes, documents, or other pre-apocalyptic, worldly agreements. When the man and son come across Ely in the story, the father informs him, “Okay means okay. It doesn't mean we negotiate another deal…