What a conflict! Every author creates some type of conflict to have the reader sitting on the edge of their seats whether the conflict be man versus man, man versus self, or man versus nature. The novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy wrote a story about both a man and a boy who have particularly conflicting characteristics when it comes to decision making. The boy in the story is very optimistic about everything and the man can be pessimistic when either deciding on what to do or when thinking about life or the future. In addition, both characters have different outlooks and personalities that can sometimes collide. Both characters act completely different when confronted by another character in the story. The man is more concerned about the safety of the boy and himself. However, the boy wants to do anything and everything to help anyone that they come across. For example, during one situation in the story, a thief attempted to steal all their belongings. When the man caught him, the boy started crying, “Papa?...Papa please don’t kill the man” (McCarthy 256). In contrast, after the man caught the thief the man held him at gun point and said, “If you dont put down the knife and get away from the cart...I’m going to blow your brains out” (McCarthy 256).The man is more concerned with their safety, whereas the boy is concerned about the wellbeing and safety of the thief. The man acts in a similar manner to Ely when the boy wants to give him food, “In the morning they stood in the road and he and the boy argued about what to give the old man” (McCarthy 173). These two characters can collide sometimes when deciding on whether or not they should give food to people like Ely or “The Lightning Man”. Not only are they different when confronted by another character, they are also different on the way they look at arising situations. People perceive situations either two ways: optimistically or pessimistically. In the book, the author showed both ways of how a person would react either optimistically or pessimistically in a post-apocalyptic world. He showed this with two characters, the man and the boy, the man reacting both pessimistically and optimistically in situations, and the boy being the optimistic character.
The father and son also have comparisons in their character, they have similar characteristics when it comes to being sensible. An example of this is when, the boy and the man come across a cannibal's lair. In this they find people being prepared to be slaughtered and eaten. In this instance both the man and the son fight to get out of the lair. They both feel the same sense of danger and unease proving that they compare to each other. Another instance of this is when the boy and his father come across other survivors walking along the road with weapons and a pregnant woman. This chills both of the characters and they hide and wait for
As one is put through times of strife and struggle, an individual begins to lose their sense of human moral and switch into survival mode. Their main focus is their own survival, not of another's. In the post-apocalyptic novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a father and son travel along the road towards the coast, while battling to survive the harsh weather and scarce food supply, as well as avoid any threats that could do them harm. Throughout their journey along the road, the father and son are exposed to the horrid remnants of humanity. As a result, the father and son constantly refer to themselves as “the good guys” and that they “carry the fire”, meaning they carry the last existing spark of humanity within themselves. By the acts of compassion
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a novel written in 2006 about a father and a son who travel through a dystopian landscape of the United States. The book can be very compelling to read, primarily because of its unpredictable plot, but also because of several unique features it possesses. These features, including the novel’s setting, weather, and season could be explained by Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, which, because of the voluminous literary elements it explains, can also be compelling to read. Foster’s explanation of these elements can help to describe why McCarthy uses enduring quests, significant meals, and harsh weather as well as an apocalyptic setting and a cold season in The Road.
We often consider the world to be filled with core truths, such as how people should act or what constitutes a good or bad action. In The Road, McCarthy directly challenges those preconceptions by making us question the actions of the characters and injecting a healthy dose of uncertainty into the heroes’ situation. From the very beginning, the characters and their location remain ambiguous. This is done so that the characters are purposely anonymous, amorphously adopting all people. While on the road, the order of the day is unpredictability; whether they find a horde of road-savages or supplies necessary for his son’s survival is impossible to foretell. While traveling, the boy frequently asks “are we the good guy” and the father always replies with “yes” or “of course,” but as the story progresses this comes into question.
The Road: Love Papa and the boy only chose to live because they both still had one shred of hope; that the other was still alive. In The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, love was very necessary in survival and happiness. A father and his son traveled the world together on foot, helping each other solve problems and making up for each other’s weaknesses. They barely ever fought, even through all of their hardships, demonstrating how much Papa and the boy loved each other. Love helped Papa and the boy keep moving forward even despite the hopelessness and violence surrounding them.
In the novel “The Road”, the author Cormac McCarthy shows how compassionate a child can be despite his surroundings. Through his novel, he takes us on an exploration of the experiences of The Boy and his father. He shows that The Boy, notwithstanding the environment that he has known his whole life.
In the wake of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, America’s new world view became entrenched in fear and insecurity. The very core of America’s belief system was rocked. This new mistrust of humanity is similar to one reflected in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, and is especially evident in the views of the father and his millennial generation son as they travel through a vast wasteland and explore the theme of good versus evil.
The apocalypse and end of modern civilization in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, “The Road” represents how difficult it is for man to survive without nature.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s novel portrays a gripping tale of survival of a father and son across a post-apocalyptic world that is devoured by marauders and cannibals that have abandoned all of their beliefs, morals and values and will do anything to survive. In contrast, the two protagonists are portrayed as the ‘good guys’ who carry the ‘fire’, and survive in the obliterated world with their own beliefs, morals and values constantly being challenged by the antagonists. As a young adolescent who has experienced the harsh environments of a war torn country such as Afghanistan, and have prior experiences of being a refugee. The novel presents several scenes that challenge my even my own past experiences and the author
To begin with, is how the father will do anything to keep the boy safe. Though there were many scenes that show the father protecting his son there was one that stood out. They confront a man that strayed too far from his group. The man took the boy hostage with a knife; “He dove and grabbed the boy… with the knife at his throat.” (66). “… leveled the pistol and fired…” (66). The father sees the danger his son is in and acts quickly, shooting the man. He was capable of shooting a man in front of his son in order to protect him.
In his novel The Road, author Cormac McCarthy implies that most of society is inherently selfish and ruthless, and he conveys this theme through the description of his characters, the plot, and his powerful world choice. In a bad bad world a papa and son do whatever it takes to survive. In the world, many natural disasters happen and it is very hard to find food and supplies. So some people result to cannibalism and stealing from others. In the book it uses lots of symbolism.
When an individual embarks on a journey, they experience a diversity of situations ranging from moments of desperation, unease, or anguish to moments of pure joy, relief, or contentment. In the post-apocalyptic novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a father and son travel along the unpredictable road, battling to survive the harsh weather and scarce food supply, as well as avoid any threats that could potentially do them harm. Throughout their journey, the father and son refer to themselves as “the good guys” and that they “carry the fire”. However as the father is on his deathbed, he reveals that the boy was the one that had always carried the fire inside of him, referring to the boy’s compassionate pleas and persistence during their travels.
Fight or flight is the instinctive physiological response to a threatening situation, which readies one either to resist forcibly or to run away. In the book The Road human instinct is shown in many different forms of fight or flight. The Road is a story written by Cormac McCarthy of a man and a boy trying to survive in a torn apart world immersed in disaster. With love, loss, inability to trust, and new setbacks coming at them, the man and the boy use their fight or flight instincts to remain alive. To grasp the man and boy’s struggles, it is important to understand the difference between the fight response and the flight response. Fight or flight is caused by many things and varies among people. These instincts that set in when people find
Scavenging for canned goods or anything barely edible is that life of a man and a boy, their only goal is to reach to the south. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a natural disaster that nearly wipe out all of humanity and leaves people on the verge of life and death. The main character, the boy, has lived his entire life in a post-apocalyptic world with cannibals roaming around unconsciously. The boy had no one to rely on except for his dad and never had any other human interaction with other people. Throughout the novel, McCarthy uses dialogue between the man and the boy to show the boy’s loss of innocence over time, reminding readers that people mature differently and according to their environment.
The boy who travels with his father finds purpose to survive in believing that they will one day find the good guys. In this he believes that they themselves carry the torch of being the good guys and finds hope in that. Throughout the novel, the boy expresses his heart for helping others several times when he gives an old scraggly man on the road a can of peaches, pleading to help a man who got struck by lightning, and by being worried about a boy who was alone they had passed on the road. The boy evidently through his actions expresses a need to help others. When the boy spotted another little boy from the road, he ran over to where he had seen him and searched for him. When the Father saw that the boy ran off, he grabbed the boy by the arm and said “‘Come on. There’s no one to see. Do you want to die? Is that what you want?’” Sobbing, the boy replied, “I don’t care, I don’t care” (85). The boy sees the little boy as alone with nothing and he feels like it is his responsibility to his own