Character Analysis: The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

A gift from God: The young Messiah in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road The Road shares the rough journey of a man and his messianic-figure son struggling to survive the morality of a post-apocalyptic world. The earth is destroyed and a majority of the once living are now deceased, however, the boy and his father continue to travel through their burned world. On their route south towards the coast, they find injured “good” guys and “bad” guys including thieves, shelter, clothes, and little food and water.

This dynamic is also displayed in Thomas’s poem when the son asks to “bless, me now with your fierce tears” (Thomas). When he requests this from his father, it can be interpreted as if he wants to take all his father's pain and inflict it on himself, in an attempt to save him. This interpretation provides a look into the mind of the son. When he is willing to sacrifice his happiness and comfort for the life of his father, that shows great love and perseverance in the bond. As Night progresses, we can see many instances where other sons turn on fathers, whether for a mere crust of bread or to keep themselves alive longer.

It seems that there is no reason to keep surviving in a world which no hopes remain, a father still perseveres to survive with his son and they are sustained by their love. On their journey, the father sacrifices a lot to protect his son and strongly shows his parental love. In this book, the father and the son have great

(Meyer). This means that in this world there are so many bad people that the man has to make tough decisions between protecting his son and helping other people who may turn out to be bad. In those circumstances he has to choose protecting his son because he cannot trust the other people. “Most significantly, at the end of the novel when the father is dying, the boy begs and pleads with his father to kill him as well, to take him into death. The man tells him that he cannot do that and that the boy must keep going, he must keep carrying the metaphorical fire that represents the will to live.”

The boy often asks what if he dies what will the father do. The man responses that he will die with him; therefore, he can be with the boy. Throughout the

The thrilling novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy is a story about a post apocalyptic world following the lives of a man and a boy as they head south to escape the cold winter that is headed their way. Along with the cold of winter approaching they also have to deal with the new dangers of the land while traveling such as cannibals, robbers, and many more dangers. This is a tale of a unnamed man and a boy who must not only learn how to survive but find a inner “fire”, establish a code of ethic, and continue in finding reasons to live in this “new world”. With McCarthy’s unique approach to the characters of the book having no names or the cause of destruction of the world unknown it helps the reader feel the confusion and whats really important

yes, had I died years ago; but now to die would be, indeed, to give way to

The father’s wife had recently died, leaving him with the boy to take care of with the only mindset of keeping him alive, doing anything for their survival. This affected the father in a big way, leaving him with little hope and hardly any reason to stay alive, but the boy was “his warrant” (McCarthy 5) , his only reason for life. The boy starts out very scared and weak, always wanting to hide behind his father, knowing that one day he will die. The boy matures with every event that happens, and he maintains to have hope throughout most of them. “The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead.

Born in A Different Life Life on the road is an idealistic way to escape from societal problems. There is no denying that it grants individuals satisfaction by allowing them to fulfill their goals, as well as providing immense freedom and control over one’s life; however, it is a fundamentally illogical path to take due to nature’s malevolence. In Into The Wild, Krakauer writes a biography about a young man named Chris McCandless, in which he illustrates the similarities between himself and McCandless’s overly ambitious journey to accomplish feats in the wilderness. Coinciding with their similarities, they also faced an oppressive father figure at home, which lead the both of them to believe that their journey will provide them an answer to their problems at home. McCandless planned to survive in Alaska by living off the land while Krakauer wanted to be the first one to climb the Devil’s Thumb.

In The Road, a novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 2006, a man and a boy struggle to survive as they travel south on the road in the post-apocalyptic world. On their journey to the coast, the man and the boy encounter the remains of an ashen world, ravaged by men who are willing to kill to survive. Among the death and destruction of the post-apocalyptic world, McCarthy illustrates how the man gains resilience from the spirituality he finds within his son, which proves how in a world void of official religion, belief in something greater than yourself creates the strength necessary to survive. The man sees his son as a spiritual figure that provides him the strength to survive in the desolate world.

The novel tells a story of an unnamed man and his son in who struggle to survive in this horrific environment. I feel that the language in the novel is verbose. McCarthy is blunt in his descriptions. He uses repeated struggles and similar scenes forcing the reader to share the tough experience of the characters. I agree with the author that The Road is the picture of a post-apocalyptic world.

Their love, just like the father’s fear and silence,

In Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road, the boy and the man are always aware of the fact that they could die at any time. Throughout the majority of the book, the man’s overarching goal is to make sure that if when he dies, the boy will have the tools to survive on his own, However, in the beginning of the book, the man’s views on death are very different. He originally believes that neither one of them would be able to survive without the other, stating that if the boy died he “would want die too” and asking himself if he can kill [the boy] when the time comes for his own death (11, 29). Similarly, the boy has an uncharacteristic view of death for a young child, stating that he wishes he “was with [his] mom”, who viewed death as a “lover”, and has

Sometimes the relationship between two generations is very complicated. “My Father Is a Simple Man” by Luis Omar Salinas and “A secret Lost in the Water” by Roch Carrier explore these universal themes, the greatness of love together with the unavoidability of conflicts between two generations through the depiction of the speakers’ personal experience with their fathers. In “My Father Is a Simple Man”, the speaker expresses his love for his father deeply by highly complimenting that his father has sincere “kindness and patience” (Salinas 23) to take the speaker on “lifelong journey” (Salinas 9-10). In the end of the poem, the speaker firmly believes that he should “have learned” (Salinas 36) something from his father which states a manifestly

Fear eventually catches up to them because what the father had been afraid of since the beginning has finally come. He dies, leaving the boy to fend on his own. Mccarthy concluded his novel with a tragic ending filled with gloom and