Cormac McCarthy, The Road

 Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Written by Cormac McCarthy, The Road is a book that highlights the journey of a father and his son during the post-apocalyptic era. The novel has won several awards and honors due to the writer’s splendid application of various literary styles to capture the attention of his audience. As a result, the book advanced McCarthy’s reputation as one of the American novelists who contribute to the development of post-apocalyptic genres.

Book Summary

The setting highlights how starvation and isolation compelled a man and his son to move to an undisclosed location. Although the place remains unnamed, McCarthy gives his reader a hint that it is the United States when the man reminds the boy that they are walking on the “state roads.” After a cataclysmic event, the father and his son travel to the east coast to fend for themselves. The man struggles to care for his son, the only source of his hope after the apocalyptic event wiped out everything in the world. However, at the end of the story, the man dies, and his child joins a group of survivors.

Characters

The book has two protagonists: a man and a young boy. Throughout the story, the writer does not name the two characters; neither does he provide details on their ages. McCarthy uses this anonymity to set the tone of the novel, a style that helps reflect the bleak and barren landscape in which the man and boy are traveling. McCarthy narrates the story through a third-person perspective, with them as the central focus across much of the story. The writer depicts the man as a resourceful parent who does odd tasks to scavenge enough food for his son. The man improvises everything, including blankets and plastic tarps to protect his family from harsh weather conditions. Unfortunately, he grows progressively weaker and dies, leaving his son vulnerable to hunger. However, the boy must survive after his father’s death.

Other characters that help in the development of the story include the woman, Ely, the little girl, thief, and the man with bow and array, among many other characters. The woman is the wife and mother of the man and boy, respectively. The story presumes that she grew weary of the bleak and brutal events in the world, leading to her death. Ely is an older man who met the protagonists in the Road but did not disclose his identity to them. The thief, just as the name suggests, is an outcast who steals from the father and his son while they are on the beach.

Setting

The location of The Road remains unknown, giving the audience a chance to conclude that it is probably on the East Coast. The mentioning of coastline, mountains, creeks, the piedmont, and several rivers suggest that the setting is on the east coast of the United States. The book reveals how the destruction of the landscape and vegetation contributed to the scarcity of food in the world. As a result, starvation pushes the man and boy are moving to other areas to search for alternative ways of survival. The destruction of cities, explosions, and unfavorable weather conditions help develop a dismal setting. The characters are always moving from the east to the southern coastline, a location that represents warmth and abundant food. Nevertheless, the man and boy did find neither warmth nor food at the ocean. The overall setting reflects a world of hopelessness, drained of life, and unfavorable weather conditions.

Themes

The primary themes in the novel are destruction, love, death, hope, and isolation. The story highlights the life and struggles of the man and his son in a barren world. The disaster contributed to the destruction of the landscape, making survivors turn into cannibalistic predators to survive. The unnamed catastrophic event resulted in the removal of plants and animals, something that imbalances the stability of the ecosystem on the East Coast. The scarcity of food compels the man and boy to isolate and travel in search of a better life consistently.

McCarthy uses rough stuff in the novel to depict a chaotic landscape in a post-apocalyptic world where survivors resort to thievery, murder, and cannibalism to scramble for the limited resources. The absence of law and order compel characters to engage in brutality as much as possible to achieve their desires. Despite all the gore and violence in the novel, there is a love story at its center. Even in this barbaric world, McCarthy uses a tender romance between the father and his son to illustrate that love can still survive. The relationship between the protagonists demonstrates that self-sacrifice and compassion are high standards for love.

Death is another essential theme in The Road. The destruction of the landscape exposes characters to starvation, illness, and scramble for limited resources. These exposures increase the constant threat of death as characters resort to thievery, murder, and even cannibalism to survive. Isolation and alienation also pose a continuous death threat to the man and boy because they do not want to reflect their past.

Analysis

From the setting, McCarthy enables his audience to understand the effects of environmental destruction. He establishes that the protagonists live in a world of hopelessness where little life survives in the ravaged landscape. Consequently, the man and boy must travel to the south along the Road to search for alternative survival tactics. Throughout the novel, the writer focuses on the bond and relationship father and son to emphasize the theme of hope.

McCarthy uses dialogue to establish a barren landscape on the Road. The setting exposes readers to skeletal shapes, frames of houses, cars, barns, and decaying bodies of human beings in the city. In other words, the man and boy only see the remains of the old world. McCarthy chooses to write in fragments aimed to portray the skeletal and barren landscape in the world. He effectively combines a tender father-son love relationship with a horror tale of wild cannibals to create the elegiac tone of the novel. McCarthy uses unflinching and a straightforward approach to establish the consequences of an apocalyptic disaster on the environment. However, such adverse effects do not stop the novelist from highlighting tender moments between a father and his son in the story. In the wake of a colossal disaster, McCarthy presents a father-son love without any irony whatsoever. In doing so, he creates a factual tone in the story tone where the man tries to rebuild the environment to enhance the chances of survival.

Conclusion

McCarthy uses several stylistic devices such as dialogue to establish the effects of unnamed catastrophic even on the Road. He employs a third-person narration to highlight the man’s internal despair as well as emphasize the moral compass and the metaphorical nature of the world. The tender relationship between father and son illustrates that love can survive in a chaotic and barbaric environment. However, such destruction exposes characters to the constant threat of isolation and death throughout the novel.