Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

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In his novel The Road, Cormac McCarthy relays the journey of a father and his son, traveling on an ash-covered road amidst a grey, desolate world. Throughout the novel, the father and son walk side by side, wheeling their cart of supplies as they set and achieve short-term goals in order to survive the atmosphere of danger and death surrounding them. Cautious in every step they take together, the journey of the father and the son becomes an attempt to reach the western coast and fulfill their ultimate goal of survival in a post-apocalyptic world. The road which they take becomes their medium to do so. However, McCarthy not only uses the concrete path as a physical journey, but he also utilizes the road as a symbolic route which connects the …show more content…
Even after laying down at their final destination on the western coast, memories still pervaded the father’s mind as he remembered, “Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different” (McCarthy 219). Although his memories were slightly cracked with pain and sorrow due to the loss of his wife, the man’s past kept his life from falling apart in a broken world; it gave him the motivation and the sanity to keep himself and his son alive and together. Traveling with his son, the father gave the boy glimpses into his joyful past through stories of courage, justice, and peace from the world previous. Such as when they came across the father’s old house, he recalled, “On cold winter nights when the electricity was out in a storm we would sit at the fire here, me and my sisters, doing our homework. The boy watched him. Watched shapes claiming him he could not see” (26). Amidst the post-apocalyptic world, the father’s reminiscent past gave hope to the man and his son that the desolate world could be restored to what it once was. Thus, …show more content…
As the ash-covered road led the father’s life to its natural end, the influence from his joyful past permeated the despairing present, which inspired his son to have hope in “carrying the fire” for humanity while maturing from his innocent naivety. Just as two parallel lanes guide opposing traffic on one road, so too, McCarthy’s symbolic road within the novel connects the dichotomies which compose one journey of life. With a road’s purpose to connect a starting place to its final destination, the journey motif within The Road is substantiated through the road itself, which transitions the father and son’s physical and mental journey through several dichotomies from the novel’s beginning to its final
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