Father Son Bonding But Make It Traumatic

Hello all and welcome to my final blog post. For my last post I wanted to delve into one of the moral concepts I found particularly interesting in McCarthy’s novel, that being his conception and development of what ‘survival’ means. The Road is a unique story of survival in the way that it develops the moral concept of survival as part of the survival story itself. We learn as the story progresses, there is a clear dichotomy in the morals of ‘survival’. McCarthy’s depictions of the horrors of the body farm make us ponder if survival is merely the preservation of the physical body, or the preservation of ourselves and who we know ourselves to be? Early on in the novel the narrator muses over the degradation of morals after the fall of the world, “People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes...Others would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled...

Hello all and welcome to my final blog post. Thank you all for accompanying me on this rollercoaster of a journey through the world of McCarthy’s The Road. The final reading section of this novel was heartbreaking to say the least. In the last hundred pages of the novel we are bombarded with images of the past and the narrator’s philosophical musings, and his eventual death. As the novel came to a close I found myself thinking hard over the question of what it all means. While a fascinating novel, the morals aren’t always direct and the message seems obscured behind layers of analysis. While I’m sure this novel can be interpreted in various ways, here is my own interpretation of its meaning. I believe that the most important message McCarthy drives home in this piece is the resilience of hope and the idea that the power we hold is not designated by our inventions and society, but by the fire we carry within ourselves. The greatest power that humankind has is hope, and even if the wor...