The Road

The Road written by Cormac McCarthy is a novel based on a post-apocalyptic setting. The story focuses on a father and a son. No names are given to either. But, the son does address his father as Papa. The father and the son are trying to survive not only by undertaking the constant struggle of getting the necessary means to live (water, food, etc.) but by surviving from the cannibals. The father and the son are traveling throughout the entirety of the novel. Before the wife had abandoned her husband and son, she told him to take their son to the south. Throughout the course of their journey, the two of them encounter many people, some good, and some bad. Although the father is deemed “good” there were a few events that could question that. When it comes to protecting their possessions, which is a shopping cart with a few supplies, and when it comes to protecting his son, the father is willing to do anything, regardless if it portrays him to be bad. Through starvation, survival, fear, and death, the father and the son make their way to the south. The father, who was dying along the journey, dies at the end, and the son goes with a family who had been following the boy and his father the whole time.

The novel is classified in the gothic genre. Do to the setting for starters, an apocalypse has occurred and wiped out almost all the face of the Earth. All that’s left is ashes, dust, and soot. Everything is grey, dark and gloomy, which are all key factors to a setting in a typical gothic novel. The fact that there is cannibalism, pain, suffering, fear all correlate to the gothic genre. The Road emanates some sort of darkness. Although there are no supernatural events that occur, it seems as if the fact that all humans that are left on the Earth have lost all of their moral conscience. The majority of the people left turned to cannibalism. No demons have taken over their body, but their own minds have. Starvation drove them to change into animals who no longer