The Road: Cormac McCarthy - Essay Example

t tends to explore the limits of human sense of caring, nurturing and goodness amidst a topography left depleted and scorched by an apocalypse (Rambo 100). The novel focuses on the intermittent rise and ebbing of hope and despair in a committed, sincere and diligent father and a timid and hesitant young son, constituting “each other’s world entire (McCarthy 11)”. The overall experience contrived by McCarthy is pervasive, oppressive and sobering, which leads the readers along a journey undertaken by this father-son duo, in quest of a socio-political scenario which has managed to survive the degrading and debasing impact of the apocalypse and where the essential human virtues and gregariousness have managed to survive.

Throughout the novel, the nature of the apocalypse remains hidden, in the backdrop of which the essential human drama involving a father and the son tends to unfold. It is a narrative that gives way to a sickening ambience marked by shuddering earthquakes, fierce and hot storms ruling a “cauterized terrain (McCarthy 17)”, a toxically ravaged air filled with ash, a long plundered landscape where pair of shoes or bits of food tends to constitute the alpha and omega of human aspirations. Essentially speaking in The Road, Cormac McCarthy has masterfully adapted the devices of viewpoint, conflict and symbolism to carve out a case for hope in a scenario dismayed with an overbearing apocalypse and total annihilation.

So far as the point of view is concerned, Cormac McCarthy has resorted to the usage of a third person, omniscient point of view to extend expression to the travails of the father and the son placed in “in the country (that) was looted, ransacked, ravaged (McCarthy 109)”. However, it would be utterly simplistic to claim that the point of view in The Road is purely third person omniscient. Rather it is a shifty and vacillating omniscient point of view that tends to time and again get transported to the consciousness of the father in