Analysis Of The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

More or less, reader-response criticism considers the readers’ reactions to literature as vital to understanding the message of the text. However, reader response criticism can lean toward an infinite number of different directions. A critic employing reader response theory is not singularly constrained to one viewpoint; therefore, they can read and interpret the literature based simply on their own thoughts and ideas.
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is a book about a father and son, set in a post-apocalyptic world where cannibals and hellish weather are abundant. Using the “Transactional” method of Reader Response theory, I interpret The Road’s foundation as describing the positive influence of the complex relationship of father and son, and
They do, however, agree on a few basic principles, the most important of which is the effect that a work has on a reader and the strategies that produce that effect” (Dobie 130-131).
Transactional analysis is an approach of reader-response criticism supported by Louise Rosenblatt, in which the critic must take two interactions between the readers and the text into consideration: how the reader analyzes and makes sense of the text, as well as how the text generate such effects and responses in him or her.
According to Rosenblatt in, “The transactional Theory of Reading and Writing, every act of reading is a transaction between a particular reader and a particular text at a particular time in a particular context. The reader and the text compose a transactional moment. The meaning does not preexist in the text or in the reader but results from the transaction between reader and text. [Most importantly] the meaning is the result of the reader’s meaning construction that engages his or her unique background knowledge and cognitive processing” (Rosenblatt 61).
The Road is a book that highly intrigued me as it created a hauntingly beautiful parallel with my own life. The narrator