The Road By Cormac Mccarthy: Living In A Post-apocalypse World

The Road is a novel that tells a tale of a father and son on their path to the south after an apocalypse. One of the most important aspects of this story is the presence of many cannibals they meet throughout their trip. The fact that so many human eaters pose a question that is; would humanity lose its humanity if an apocalypse occurred in the true globe? What is the author saying about the novel's human nature? It would rely on the individual and on the way in which the individual is raised, although most probably many people would lose their morals and give in to cannibalism because people doing anything to survive would have an enormous effect on individuals, such as the world is unlawful. There are many reasons why this would happen, and to demonstrate it, there are some instances from the book itself.

First, people in this age are mostly living with morals, as there are laws that stop people from doing despicable things and maintain stuff in order, despite this, there are still many people who mean damage to others. If regulations vanished, individuals would lose their morals and no penalties for violations. I think many people, even if they steal something that isn't so large, would do something unethical in some way. The writer provides us the sense that man and boy are in a world that is evil through the use of colors like gray, black, and dark-themed colors because it is a South Gothic novel. This provides us the feeling that the environment in which they reside is unlawful and is covered by evil, like cannibals that mean danger to others. He demonstrates to us that, as quickly as the law was out of the manner, individuals returned to their primal nature. There are many instances in the novel of how individuals have lost their humanities. There's the part where 3 men are chasing a pregnant mother 'The man and boy stay where they're for the night and let the people go. The next morning, they see smoke coming from the place where the people camped. They go to investigate and find a burnt and headless infant cooking over an open fire”. This illustrates to us how individuals have lost their humanity, even eating a defenseless newborn to put something in their stomach. I believe that with these examples, McCarthy accomplished his objective and showed us that if the law was out of the manner, individuals could do anything.

The second reason individuals to lose their humanity and cannibalize is that humans would eat other humans to remain alive in an apocalyptic environment, no food sources imply individuals eating each other to remain alive and survive. In order to survive, most individuals would do anything, even if it means losing their humanity and eating their own flesh. Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who received the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, has shown that how we believe has a definite developmental significance. The manner we handle and understand data, fix problems and create choices, what he calls 'cognitive biases,' does not always lead in the most precise or highest results, but they are the most effective in terms of time and energy expenditure and 'good enough' for our existence. This phrase from a prize awarded psychologist demonstrates us that individuals do whatever they can to live, even if the result is not precise or the finest. McCarthy demonstrates this to us in the novel with too many cannibals and they do so many cruel activities to live. For example, there is an example of this in the novel where man and boy fall on a big room outside a tiny town. The father would like to examine the building. The son wants to leave, but with a spade, the father keeps on opening the padlock. When they enter the house, the father discovers huge numbers of people, 'naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands'. One man's legs have been amputated up to his hips, and the room reeks. The people beg the man for help. We see in this scene that they store actual people and keep them alive so they will not decompose and cut their legs and arms so they will not die and consume them fresh. This is not something a human being would do in normal circumstances, however, the instinct of survival makes these people do it in conditions such as those in the novel. Survival instinct makes a person do anything, but it's too much to bear for some, like the man's wife, and she just kills herself instead of facing these hard choices, and their humanity comes first for some like the man and the boy no matter what happens. If they starved to death, they would also not eat human flesh. We can see this where they starved to death at some stage until a building complete of goods was discovered. It even demonstrates us their ethical manner of living, thanks to the people who left the meals for them. The boy is telling the man “Do you think we should thank these people that gave us all this”, and the man agrees and starts praising and thanking them and wishes that they were in heaven with God. This shows us the difference between the people who eat human flesh, and the man and the boy.

Some people who are born in the apocalyptic would consume other individuals just because everyone else is. They would follow their parents ' measures and the individuals they see. This is called the mentality of the community. People will do anything to be part of a group, even when they don't like it. Some individuals even say they've accomplished something even though they're not just a component of the audience, or they're participating in something without questioning it just because there are many other individuals. They would do the same without questioning in an apocalyptic environment when individuals see others eating human bodies because it has already become a rule for that culture. This reason is sufficient for individuals to begin eating human bodies because they are unresponsive to their surroundings and are unable to believe for themselves when they see so many individuals doing the same thing; killing individuals.

In summary, I firmly think that if an apocalypse existed in true lives as in the novel, many humans would lose their ethical manner of life. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is that law is out of the way people wouldn't be afraid of doing anything, even though it's evil. Secondly, human beings have urges of survival and they even attempt to lose their humanity to survive. Lastly, individuals would lose their ethics because they already have everyone around them, and after some period it will appear to be the standard of culture. Even if this is the case, there would be someone like the man and the boy who would not end up losing their humanity until they die and be the 'good guys.' These facts show that although most individuals would lose their humanity, not everyone would, and human behavior in the novel is two forms some 'good ones' and some 'evil ones.'