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The Road Hope Quotes

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1. A feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen.
2. A person or thing that may help or save someone.
3. Grounds for believing that something good may happen.
These are the definitions of the word “Hope” as given in The Oxford Dictionary and at first sight we might think that The Road doesn’t even come close to having a single ray of hope in it. How could there be hope in a novel that begins with a bleak picture of a burnt, dead world and ends with the death of one of the “good guys” who promised and gave his son hope that he would not leave him? But we don’t have to look too close to see that the novel can actually be, all about hope. Not losing hope, carrying on even when the odds seem to never be in your favor, even …show more content…

They all wish for a better life in which they don’t have to scavenge for food and live like animals, in fear of someone stronger than them to take what they have worked hard for or to take their lives. Because in the end everybody wants to live and see another day even if it means seeing another day in which they don’t really know whether it is day or night or whether this new day will bring anything different from the day before. It is just like what Ely says “Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.” (McCarthy 64). Ely comes across as a wise character at some points and at others it seems as if he is talking gibberish. From someone as old as him, who has seen so much in life and who admits to the Man that he had even seen this coming and had believed in it, it is a surprise to hear that he did not prepare for it at all and does not believe in God. Belief in God is also a symbol of hope in the novel although most of the characters do not believe in him or are agnostic. A very good example of this is when at the end the man dies and the family takes the boy in and we are shown that they are also one of the “good guys” and the woman is seen as a strong believer so we can deduce that maybe the boy being instantly “saved” after his father’s death is an act of God and that he is there for those who believe and have faith. Ely’s disbelief is probably due to the fact that he has seen too …show more content…

The memories also play a dual role as they make the man hopeful yet they also scare him because he is afraid that through remembering things again and again he might taint his memories of the good times forever. “He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.” (McCarthy 51). The boy although carries on hoping even though all he has are memories of the polluted grey ashes that have always been falling from the sky, the ashes that he was born into. The child has no memories of a past world that held beauty and color and so he relies on his father’s accounts and stories of the past to imagine a world that was anything but the bleakness that he is so accustomed to. But the father, although mostly indulges to the child’s wishes, sometimes cannot bring himself to tell him made up stories of the past because as much as he wants to he cannot remember a lot of it and when he does remember it, it reminds of a world that is no more and that he does not know will ever come back into existence or not. “What would you like? But he stopped making things up because those things were not true either and the telling made him feel bad.” (McCarthy 22). Where at first the child believes the father’s accounts of heroes and stories of courage

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