Explanatory Synthesis Essay: The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

The Road, a post apocalyptic novel,written by Cormac McCarthy, tells the story of a father and son traveling along the cold, barren and ash ridden interstate highways of America. Pushing all their worldly possessions in a shopping cart, they struggle to survive. Faced with despair, suicide and cannibalism, the father and son show a deep loving and caring that keeps them going through unimaginable horrors. Through the setting of a post apocalyptic society, McCarthy demonstrates the psychological effects of isolation and the need to survive and how these effects affect the relationships of the last few people on Earth.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, is an enticing, but soul-wrenching novel that perfectly conveys the precise conditions of a cold, desolate world, in which one feels utterly isolated. McCarthy does not hesitate to go into detail about powerful or foul events within the plot. He says exactly what he means, and can effectively incorporate forceful interactions between the characters and each other, as well as characters and their given environment. By using the literary devices of symbolism, imagery, and theme, McCarthy handcrafts a novel with such eloquence and grace that such a bleak and miserable world is perhaps a seemingly beautiful one.

In each novel of his personal literary journey, Cormac McCarthy examines death and God in different ways. Edwin T. Arnold, who wrote his essay “Blood and Grace: The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy” before The Road, examines how “McCarthy’s protagonists are most often those who, in their travels, are bereft of the voice of God and yet yearn to hear him speak” (14). In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the father explicitly describes his son as god; however, by juxtaposing the father and the son and examining their divine resemblances, it is not the boy but the man who embodies God, supporting Ely’s claim that this post-apocalyptic world is too harsh for God to exist.

In a world where survival is your only concern, what would you do to stay alive? This is one of many thought-provoking questions that Cormac McCarthy encourages in his book, The Road. McCarthy, a Rhode Island native is a seasoned author, with more than 14 other works in his portfolio. McCarthy is a very private man, and there isn’t a lot known about him. The lack of information on McCarthy does not reflect his writing abilities, which are very strong and not lacking at all.

Cormack McCarthy’s novel, The Road, is set in a post apocalyptic world, where humanity is struggling to survive. Through his simplistic writing style and powerful symbolism, McCarthy tells a story about the human condition as well as what it truly means to be human. Though it is set in a wasteland this novel still manages to project hope through the love of a boy and his father. The following passages are quotes that spoke to me stylistically or symbolically while I was reading.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy details a post-apocalyptic world with mysterious origins. While there are many questions about this world, the reader is left to their own imagination to determine how it got that way. Within this world, there is a man and a boy, father and son trying to make their way and survive until they can find a safe haven that may or may not exist. The see many things along the way and the man instills in the boy that it is important to remain a good guy and always “carry the fire”. Carrying the fire refers to the light inside of you that makes you who you are and may also carry the “goodness” of human nature. Inevitably, the man meets his fate via a mysterious illness leaving the boy on his own. The boy is then introduced to a family that has been following them knowing that the man was not well and the boy would need someone to look after him.

Humanity disagrees about tradition, religion, party choice, and almost everything that people could agree or disagree with, but music has the power to put aside all those differences and bring people together. The Road by Cormac McCarthy takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where everything including the sweet sounds of music is gone. No matter the time or the place, music has an effect on every living human being. Whether it’s the first time hearing music or listening and bonding with friends over the new top song, music is what people can always rely on to create endless sounds of joy. The people in this book have a feeling of emptiness and silence in which now they forget what those beautiful sounds are like.

For my research proposal I have decide to choose a book titled: The Road, by Cormack McCarthy, published in 2006. This novel is about a middle aged man and his young son who are trapped on a newly apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by intense fires, earthquakes and winds that leave everything around them covered in ash. The man and the boy face a difficult task of trying to find safety among what is now a somewhat deserted wasteland. Their journey is confronted with many obstacles such as; bad air quality left by the ash and dangerous chemicals, a minimal amount of food and water supply, thieves, and scavengers who are made up of gangs that go around murdering any human or animal alike for their meat and other supplies.

There are a few luxuries in life that may seem necessary, but in the midst of a tragedy such things that were close to the hearts of many become useless. In The Road certain pleasures morph into sorrow, mocking the characters of a past world that is now out of reach. Examples Cormac McCarthy incorporates in The Road are: the “childhood home”, “Coca-Cola”, and the “flute”, in which these items were scraped from the characters everyday lives. Their standard of living calls for only the basic necessities in life. The novel revolves around the idea that it takes a tragedy in order to recognize what has value, extraneous articles become a thing of the past.

The Road, published in 2006, and written by Cormac McCarthy, is a book of it’s own. You can’t compare it to another, because there is arguably no book quite like it. Many think that while the novel is not as popular as McCarthy’s best works, it gives you just as much to read and think about. McCarthy did this through various literary devices. McCarthy’s dark themes, original Southern Culture, vivid dialogue, unique lack of punctuation, concealed structure, and exotic characters, are all significant in The Road.

“The Road” depicts a solemn and deteriorating environment that can no longer provide the fundamentals to a society due to the nuclear disaster. The sudden depletion of the resources within their environment made it difficult for the father and the son to find sustenance. They were constantly traveling towards the South looking for safe places to situate themselves because the father knew that they would not be able to survive the nuclear winter. The genre of the novel is post-apocalyptic science fiction because it revolves around a dismantling society. Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” depicts how environmental destruction finally gave sense for people to value the world and what it had to offer.

“And nothing bad is going to happen to us… because we’re carrying the fire.” (McCarthy, 83) In the award winning novel, The road, by Cormac McCarthy a boy is traveling down a road with his father in a post-apocalyptic world where around every corner something bad can happen, in this dark and gloomy world there are cannibals and death all around. The world is dying and with it everyone's humanity. The boy is a symbol of hope compassion and protection in a world that is full of death and destruction.

The Road is a story where is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where the date and location is unnamed. The author of the novel Cormac McCarthy doesn 't describe why or how the disaster has demolish the earth. But after reading the novel, I can sense that the author wanted to present a case of mystery and fear to the unknown to the reader. By the author 's exclusion I think that the story gains a better understanding of what the author wanted to express to the reader. An expression of a man and his son surviving in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is his post-apocalyptic magnus opus which combines a riveting plot along with an unconventional prose style. Released in 2006, the novel has won awards such as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award (Wilson). Oprah Winfrey also selected the book for her book club ("Cormac McCarthy”). The author, Cormac McCarthy, was born in 1933 in Rhode Island and is said to have wrote the novel because of his son and their relationship. The Road centers around a boy and his father while they try to survive after an unknown disaster occurs. While some people may argue that the unusual style takes away from the novel, it adds to the tone and meaning of the work.

Imagine yourself living in a barren, desolate, cold, dreary world, with a constant fear of the future. The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006, is a vivid and heartwarming novel that takes us through the journey of a father and a son as they travel South in a post-apocalyptic environment facing persistent challenges and struggles. McCarthy proves that love unleashes immense strength to overcome obstacles, even in times of desperation.