Kierkegaard Chapter 4

How does Cormac McCarthy’s Novel The Road, challenge a reader’s ideas, beliefs, experiences and values?

McCarthy’s The Road exemplifies the struggle to survive throughout the entire novel. In the most trying times, during the longest stretches without food, the father’s persistence and confidence

What makes Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road stick out from most dystopian works is that The Road takes place not before or during but after the end. The novel follows a man and his son as they survive the dangers of what once was the United States after an unspecified calamitous event. There is not much left of the world: no food, no animals, and no hope. Many readers will ponder how someone could still be motivated to keep moving forward under such circumstances. If we were living in the same conditions as the man and the boy, this question might seem more imperative. But arguably it is a question that can be applied to today: what, if anything, makes human life valuable or worthwhile? Through the dialogue between the characters, the novel provides two conflicting arguments that serve as potential answers for this question. The first argument is hope, which is associated with the Christian religion, while the other argument is futility, which has a nihilistic outlook of the ravaged world. This paper will examine the Christian imagery and nihilistic arguments contained in the novel and how the moral systems of the two conflict. While at first The Road might present itself as a powerful challenge to both Christian and nihilistic views of the world, in the end, the novel never explicitly reject either worldview.

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road is a harrowing tale of a man and his son who live in an unknown world right after an apocalypse, which destroys the world. The book explains the experiences of the man and his son as they journey across barren land. The journey takes a toll on both of them and their experiences were

Cormac McCarthy’s brain child “The Road” is a postapocalyptic novel that illustrates the harsh reality of the world. This story serves as a truth that humans, when stripped of their humanity will take desperate measures in order to survive. The reader learns; however even when it seems all hope is lost good can still be found in the world. The son character of this story illuminates this philosophy. He is a foil of his father and shows how even a person never accustomed to the luxury of a normal life can still see goodness.

This work brought to my attention that when placed in a situation that would test one’s morals, humans show the capacity to display both goodness and depravity. Throughout the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, there are many acts of pure wickedness while on the other hand there are instances where great beauty appears.

The ability to view an author’s unpublished draft can be comparable to viewing the author’s journey and method to the finalization of their work and also observe what message is trying to be displayed through the text Upon observation of The Road and the unpublished draft The Grail, I have concluded that there are three key observations that create an concrete analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s progression of his work that show the mother scene shift from mortal anxiety to rationalization of the mother’s actions.

shows us how followed his dreams and was determined to also do them.This novelle also gives us a thought of how we should see life compared to everyone else & if life comes with wanting to fit fit in with everyone else.When you think of someone going the other direction or not fitting in,it makes them feel different.

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road is a story about how McCarthy believes the world will be after a disaster that kills millions of people. The book follows the lives of a man, known as Papa, and his son, known as the Boy. It is about their journey to find the other good guys, and how they survive in a world filled with starvation, pain, and death. In The Road, many people die. The two most important deaths are of the Boy’s Mother and Father. The two very different ways they die shows how death is accepted by various people and what they are feeling when they die. McCarthy uses death as a method of portraying how people felt about dying, and how it impacts the way that they are feeling when they die, and how it motivates them to live.

While the internal struggle to follow our own moral compass is always present, The Road, illuminates that this struggle becomes hyperbolic when we our basic necessities are depleted. The post-apocalyptic scenario presented within McCarthy’s, The Road, explores a new sense of morality amidst a time of starvation, dehydration, and immanent danger. Our moral agents, the man and the boy, have made the

The ability to paint beautiful ideas on a canvas of dark events and imagery is an essential skill in the arsenal of an accomplished writer. In his novel The Road, Cormac McCarthy demonstrates his understanding of this skill. A reviewer from the San Francisco Chronicle described The Road saying, “[McCarthy’s] tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy’s stature as a living master. It’s gripping, frightening, and, ultimately, beautiful.” These descriptions of the tale are true throughout the novel, but particularly at the ending of the story. In the final pages of the book, McCarthy continues to engage the reader with gripping and frightening moments, to emphasize the theme of survival, and to reveal beauty and “the miracle of goodness.”

Archetypal criticism follows a basic rule of categorizing or relating any work of literature into a set framework. It works from a subjective basis, it is used to determine and grasp the ideas of universal truths messages through literary work. The universal truths and messages are determined by identifying patterns like character types, storylines, settings, symbols. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel that accurately exemplifies the principles of archetypal criticism. This narrative account associates the characters of a young minor and his father to encapsulate the ideas of archetypal criticism. McCarthy presents the novel by setting the scene of a death-defying journey through a post-apocalyptic wasteland of America. The young lad

In the novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy illustrates the expressions, settings and the actions by various literary devices and the protagonist’s struggle to survive in the civilization full of darkness and inhumanity. The theme between a father and a son is appearing, giving both the characters the role of protagonist. Survival, hope, humanity, the power of the good and bad, the power of religion can be seen throughout the novel in different writing techniques. He symbolizes the end of the civilization or what the world had turned out to be as “The Cannibals”. The novel presents the readers with events that exemplify the events that make unexpected catastrophe so dangerous and violent. The novel reduces all human and natural life to the

For ages, people have been debating the idea of human morality and whether or not at its core humanity is good or bad. This philosophy is explored in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road. The road is the story of a man and boy living in a post-apocalyptic world. Some cataclysmic event has crippled Earth’s natural ecosystem, leaving the skies engulfed in ash and the ground devoid of much life. The duo aim to journey south as a way to escape being frozen to death in the oncoming winter. During their journey, the boy and man come across different people and places that give them a better understand of what humanity has become and where they stand on that spectrum. Throughout The Road, McCarthy revisits the idea of being the “good guy” when there is no longer a need to, “carrying the fire” as it’s detailed in the book. The dichotomy between the boy’s moral conscience and the man’s selfish ideals helps develop McCarthy’s idea of humanity losing its selflessness in the face of danger.

This question is a little complex for me because I have to remember why I took that decision back in 1997, when I did my Bachelor Degree in my native country Mexico. I recall how important was for my parents and for me was the only way to explore knowledge, one of my drives as person is to find out the "why's" of everything. Attending college gave me that opportunity to found the answers and also to explore different perspectives of how to live my life. Now the I'm back to college the reasons might be different but the necessity of knowledge has been present all this years.