Desolation In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road published in 2006, life is nothing short of hell on Earth. It starts in America post-unknown apocalypse. Everything is pitch black, covered in ash. The good guys wander the road, carrying the fire, avoiding everyone. If something hasn’t been looted by now it wasn’t safe to eat. Amidst all this wreckage a father and son keep trying to make it through carrying the fire, alone with their memories and ideals. Throughout The Road McCarthy shows how isolated people are even with each other.
This is shown in the beginning of the book on page seven. “Dust and ash everywhere. The boy stood in the door. A metal desk, a cash register. Some old automotive manuals, swollen and sodden. The linoleum was stained and curling from …show more content…
“He’d been visited in a dream by creatures of a kind he’d never seen before. They did not speak...they’d been crouching by...his cot as he slept and then had skulked away...He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well...[P]erhaps they’d come to warn him...That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.”(McCarthy 153-154). Through dream the father realizes how strange a person he must be to his son. He likens himself to an alien comparing how both would be equally strange through metaphor. Moreover, the barrier(s) are insurmountable. In order to bridge the world divide the father has to build a world; construct a wonderful world the child probably will never see. A world not only ashes in his heart. A world truly turned to ash. He is isolated as one of the sole survivors carrying the fire from a bygone era. By the end of the book he passes the fire to his son. The son not truly knowing why, or anything about it other than he must for the strange man that was his

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