Literary Analysis Of The Road By Cormac Mccarthy
Cormac McCarthy’s noble literature skills return in the form of his novel The Road, a novel highlighting the relationship between a man and his son in a melancholic post-apocalyptic world. The readers follow the nameless protagonists through their intimidating pilgrimage to the south where the two hope to adopt a better life. McCarthy writes with the intent of immersing the audience into the novel, drawing them in with the clever use of imagery and literary devices to enhance the narrative. He describes the scenes of their desolate environment skillfully and weaves it into the character’s stories. The clever use of tone in the book develops the atmosphere and works wonders in shaping the characters and their interactions.
McCarthy creates a harrowing yet complex read for the public using the presence of the environment in The Road not only as a key factor in the way the characters interact but who they are. It’s quickly evident to the readers that the man has less than optimistic outlooks on the world. Such traits and the father’s hardshell exterior towards others besides the boy can be drawn back to the harsh environment they have been forced to live in. The man’s pessimistic views are established early into the novel when McCarthy writes that “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death”. The man is so deprived of happiness that he perceives any dreams of pleasantness as a weakness, and once he dreams of something nice death has arrived and he’s lost all hope. The world they live in prevents not only the ability to experience blissful things but even to simply recall upon such times in the subconscious without resulting in a sense of failure.
While the man consistently keeps up his front when in the presence of others, the readers, of course, get to witness his moments of vulnerability. The man has his fair share of internal conflicts in the novel the biggest one being him questioning his ability to kill his time should the time come: “Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn’t fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him towards you. Kiss him. Quickly”. It is clear that the father cares deeply for his child and the thought of killing him comes no easier to him than it would to any parent. One must wonder, what kind of appalling conditions one would face till reaching the idea of needing to relieve one’s child from their own misery? They face the trials of searching for food, shelter, and merely trying to survive amongst the “bad guys” or cannibals: “Because we’re the good guys. Yes. And we’re carrying the fire. And we’re carrying the fire. Yes. Okay”. McCarthy uses fire to symbolize human morality in a world where such ideals had long been abandoned by many.
The world has no mercy for the duo and continues to throw at them experiences that would deeply impact any individual. Of course not only does the post-apocalyptic world drastically affect the man but the boy as well. In addition to them being impacted individually, it affects the way they interact with each other and the means by which they can do so. The narrator explains that “Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he”. The boy and the man have a significant difference between them; that being the man is from “both” worlds. The world before it became a wasteland and as it is in the novel. This contrasts the boy who has only ever known the calamitous world he was born into. This creates a barrier between the two which neither of them can ever ultimately erase. The father cannot tell joyful tales of the world before without there being a constant reminder of how dreadful the world is and the fact that it wouldn’t return to its past state. The world has prevented them from speaking the same language whereas if they lived in the “normal” world before the apocalypse they would have the same vision of the world. Not only this but the fact is also that the hardships they constantly face force the boy to be more mature than a typical child his age would have been in the old world. It’s eminent that their surroundings impact both of them immensely, both individually and their relationship. Their situation only worsens and worsens as the readers follow them along their path south. The father’s health becomes dire and there is a point where it is clear to him and his son. Before anything gets too serious the father begins to say things that might be McCarty’s way of foreshadowing: “Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie”. The man is merely explaining that to their dismay, man is not immortal. He wants the boy to be realistic albeit he by no means wishes for him to give up. The quote can almost be read as motivating in a way. The man claims every day is a lie, expressing that they live in a world where everyone replays the past; everyone who is alive is alive with the hopes of resurrecting the past. Eventually, the world catches up with the man as we can infer when reading that “In the nights sometimes now he’d wake in the black and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun”. This if we recall connects to the man's previous statement about dreams. He’s now waking from dreams full of pleasant things, McCarthy’s way of not only shadowing his death but developing the characters storylines. He purposely exposes us to the man as stubborn with all his mantras knowing that he’d eventually lead to this moment in which we witness the final impacts their surroundings have on their life. We did not see the beginning; however, we got to see them adapt and the man’s end. If they had not lived in the world they did their stories would have been remarkably different.
McCarthy’s setting of a godforsaken world worked as the structure for his novel. The Road uses literary devices methodically, adding layers to what could have been a rather bland story about a father and his son. Disaster is present physically in the world they occupy and in the characters themselves. Tragedy is reflected in every page of McCarthy’s novel and The Road does not cease to deliver in the execution of details regarding both the tragic world and the characters themselves.
