The Role Of Hope In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

Words: 1859
Pages: 8

Hope- the natural human desire to keep going and hoping for something better among an uncivilized world. As long as an individual has hope, they can recover from the paralyzing immobility of life. Agilely composed by Cormac McCarthy, The Road is a searing post-apocalyptic novel that illuminates an extraordinary hope that depicts on the cryptic and mysterious reassurance that hope is the only thing between a man and the abyss. In a new world consumed by dust and ashes and nights that are beyond darkness, are a man and a boy who’s suffering appears as infinite. Left alone together by a mother who took her life with the blade of obsidian, each day the man and the boy chronicle their return to sorrow; time for them does not progress, rather it revolves and circles on the …show more content…
In a world where “God never spoke” (5), the man became a zealot in pursuance of hope that drove him and the boy to the edge of death in reach for an unknown destination. The nameless man borne an insurmountable dream for the future, that his son may one day captivate that the way to survival is entirely the illumination of aspirations. Thus, bewildering himself to persist beyond will in this drive, he creates an illusion that intentionally forces him to become unconscious of his impending death and that one day he and the boy will no longer physically be “each the other’s world entire” (6). Yet, though the man chooses to persist in a world where slow darkness falls over everything with human bodies stretched in all vicinity, he internally suffers from the grayness of his heart and the immutable depths of numbness. “Every day is a lie” (238), for the man as he consistently turns a blind eye to the fact that his son sees everything like the eyes of God; but, it is as if he lost his mind to an extent to where he is both