Good Vs. Evil In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

2886 Words12 Pages
The Road Cormac McCarthy’s The Road gives his views and ideals about the world and what he feels about the weaknesses and struggles of human beings. McCarthy’s The Road talks about death as one of the major issues happening throughout the world. Women are seen as being weak and gutless and there is clearly a battle between the opposites of good vs. evil. The setting also shows McCarthy’s views on how the world could end up and how people can start turning on one another being so quick to give up. McCarthy’s language helps with giving a picture of all these views. In The Road death is shown happening throughout the world and no one is really safe in this new post-apocalyptic world. Billions of people are being lost through…show more content…
Throughout The Road women are shown to give up easily. The father tells the son “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up” (McCarthy 137). McCarthy even made the mother end her own life just because she didn’t want to see her son grow up in the apocalyptic world. “In fact, when the mother calmly discusses her own suicide, she correctly predicts these occurrences: "Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. [...] They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it" (56). In some ways, her brutal acceptance of the world-as-it-has-become is much braver than the father's I'm-sure-everything-will-be-fine-when-we-get-to-the-coast brand of denial. Her willingness to murder her own child to protect him from one of the cruelest worlds in recent literature stands in direct opposition to the father, who, when finally faced with the decision, says, " I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant" (279). The mother briefly touches on this difference when she says, "They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I dont dream at all. [...] My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so dont ask for sorrow now. There is none" (57). Though she brought her child into the world, she knew the world was no place for either her or him,…show more content…
The use of his language compliments the imagery he builds throughout the story. He makes everything seem so depressing and gloomy. The characters don’t have names, even the main characters are referred to as “the boy” and “the man.” All the diction is very pessimistic and descriptive. It even makes this sad story unsentimental. McCarthy says things like “He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must” (McCarthy 15). The language he uses makes the world seem impossible to live in. All the words he uses is used to frighten and inspire. The Road is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional styles. “Susan Stewart argues that "The movement from realism to modernism and postmodernism is a movement from the sign as material to the signifying process itself." The Road can be considered as a good example of a modernist
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