The Struggle In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

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The Struggle in The Road The novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a really good interpretation of how a post- apocalyptical world would be. The true distinction between good and evil behaviors is how people survived in an abandoned civilization and how they encounter the obstacles. It demonstrates the struggle of being good guys vs. bad guys in a post-apocalyptical world through symbolism, characterization and the setting. Symbolism illustrates the theme of the struggle of being good guys in a post-apocalyptical world through the road, trout and fire. The road symbolizes the journey It “was [always] empty,” (12) no sign of any life. It is full of danger, “a corpse in a doorway dried to leather” (12). The symbol of the trout indicates…show more content…
The son always thinks that he is going to die, and the son is always afraid. His character starts off flat but then he progresses into a round character. He ends up “carrying the fire” which indicates that the son is willing to survive and “he talked to his father and he didn’t forget” (270) about his father’s belief. The son tells his father “you’re not the one who has to worry about everything” (259) shows us the transition of the son from boy to man. The father is a round character, he was complicated. He did not have the will power to kill his son. His belief was that his son was the only remaining sign of God’s existence and without his son the man really had nothing to live for. At the end when the father is dying, “he thought he could hold his son in his dead arms” (279) but he couldn’t because he did not have the will power to do so. Throughout the book the father does not have any will power to harm his son and he succeeds in making his son live. The bond between the father and the son is what really shapes the book. The father takes care of his son and tries his best to keep him alive; “this is my child. I was a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job” (74). The two depend on each other. At first when the son would ask if “they were going to die” the father would say “sometime. Not now” but throughout the end of the book, when the father starts to get ill and deteriorates, he begins to realize that the son should live on and be a survivor to carry the
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