Cormac Mccarthy’s "The Road"

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is a moving story of a father and a son in a post apocalypse world. They are constantly struggling to get food, shelter, and safety. Unfortunately the people of this world have turned against their own kind and have had to revert to cannibalism to survive. There are many important themes presented in this novel, but the two I would like to focus on are death and parental love. These two themes are present throughout the entire novel, and they help characterize and shape the characters. The two main characters are the Father and the son, and we meet others along the way. The first theme I would like to focus on is death. The characters are constantly under threat of death, through either starvation or murder. They are attempting to escape death by traveling south so they don’t have to suffer through a very cold winter. They also escaped death during the apocalypse, which is amazing in itself considering they are two of the few people left on the planet. In this world, the animals, such as cows, were all killed. The boy in the story had never seen a bird or a fish. There is no vegetation either. This theme of death is everywhere and we, the readers, are constantly reminded of this because McCarthy uses the literary element setting so well. I spoke to many of my friends about this topic and we discussed many other ways McCarthy portrayed the theme of death. As the reader gets farther and farther into the novel, we learn that the father is dying. “In the night, he woke in the cold dark coughing until hid chest raw... He knelt there wheezing softly, hands on his knees. I’m going to die, he said.” The image of death also appears when the father dreams of his wife, who committed suicide previously. It is clear McCarthy intended on presenting death as a major theme in his novel. The other theme I’d like to acknowledge would be parental love. The entire novel is focused on the father and the son, so we learn a lot about their