Love In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

Significance of Love in The Road
Even in the catastrophic atmosphere Cormac McCarthy creates in his novel The Road, love influences a man and his son to have faith in their survival. In this post-apocalyptic world, love is the only motivation they have in what is left of their world. Love between the man and his son motivates them to keep traveling down this broken road. Without the love that is made between the man and his son, having faith in their survival would be hard to find.
The mother, seeing the world for what it is, loses hope and takes her life regardless of what the man says. In the novel the women tells the man, “I’m speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him.
When he tells his father, his father responds, “There is no one to see.” The father than states that, “they must go now”. The boy gets very upset and the father questions, “Do you want to die? Is that what you want?” When the boy responds, “I don’t care,” the father gets upset and expresses to the boy that he, “musn’t say that” (McCarthy 85). This is a primary example of the father reassuring the boy still has hope. The father not only makes sure the boy has hope, he also tries to give the boy hope. He gives the boy hope by telling them they are not going to die soon. This is proven in the novel when the boy asks, “Are we going to die” and the man says, “Sometime. Not
Do you understand? And you can’t give up. I wont let you” (McCarthy 189). The father’s love can be shown by him trying to guide his son to not dream happy dreams. The father’s point is, his son will be happy for the short time while he is asleep, but when he wakes up he will be more miserable knowing the world in his dreams are more superior than the world he is actually in. On the other hand, if the boy’s dreams are about a horrific world, when the boy wakes up the world he is in will not look as immoral as the world he dreams about. The father gets this idea from him having good dreams. This is revealed when the author says in the novel, “In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leady canopy. Her nipples pipe clayed and her rib bones painted white. She wore a dress of gauze and her dark hair was carried up in combs of ivory, combs of shell. Her smile her downturned eyes. In the morning it was snowing again. Beads of small gray ice strung along the light wires overhead”(McCarthy 18). While this shows the man having a good dream about his wife on their wedding day, it is just the father losing hope. As the father has lost hope he thrusts his son to not be like him. He is telling his son that by dreaming bad dreams, it drives you to have more hope (things can