The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is a novel that supports a Darwinist survival ethic and adherence to natural laws. McCarthy portrays the romantic nostalgia the anonymous man has for nature and the pre-apocalyptic but makes it clear that such idealization of a dead world is perilous in the naturalistic context of the novel. Naturalistic characteristics such as discussion of taboo topics, animal imagery, a prevailing mood of pessimistic determinism, Darwinist necessity, as well as the detached method of narration all help to prove the theme of The Road.
The theme is built on the underlying valuation of humanity and concern for its well-being as expressed through its concern for the human consequences of environmental catastrophe.
Essay Example on The Road Thesis
To begin with, the post-apocalyptic setting of The Road deserves significant attention, for the novel derives much of its naturalism from the scorched apocalyptic landscape in which the nameless father and son find themselves. Although McCarthy keeps the circumstances of the apocalypse vague, it is clear that some catastrophe occurred that scorched the land and killed most of humanity.
Save for a few isolated pockets of the population, such as the protagonists, humankind has been reduced to roving bands of cannibals. As the narrator puts it, after the disaster the Earth was “soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes” as well as “blackened looters…crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell” (McCarthy 181).
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In true naturalistic fashion, the dominant survivors are those willing to do anything, including cannibalism, to survive. Those that did not “sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded Earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and unremarked as the path of any nameless sister world in the ancient dark beyond” (181). The taboo topic…
The Road Cormac Mccarthy Analysis. (2019, Nov 27). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/paper-on-the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy/
