, 2015
The names may change, but the streets stay the same. Likewise, in an ever changing world, one thing stays exactly the same: human nature. In post-apocalyptic literature, readers are exposed to a whole different world in a different time, yet the characters and societies that readers learn about are remarkably similar to people and civilization throughout time. These similarities can be distinguished by The Road by Cormac McCarthy and By The Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benet. Both stories show two types of societies: progressive and regressive. Also, both stories portray false idealization. Inevitably, the universal struggle of good vs. evil comes into play as well. For these reasons the Road and By The Waters of Babylon show…show more content… In By The Waters of Babylon, the protagonist worshipped fallen people and their city. Without any actual evidence, the protagonist’s society glorified the “gods” when they were just regular people. The protagonist realizes this at the end, “I knew then that they had been men, neither gods nor demons. It is a great knowledge, hard to tell and believe.” After seeing the “gods” and actually gaining proof, the boy abandoned his faith and realized that the disaster was not supernatural but actually induced by man. False worshipping is also evident in the film The Hunger Games; President Snow is worshipped like a God and people do whatever he says. The Capital is shown to be a savior of all the districts and people actually obeyed the capital since they did not realize that President Snow is a corrupt human running a totalitarian regime until Katniss rose to fame. False sense of hope can also distort perspectives as well. In The Road, the man and his son had a false sense of hope about The South. He assumed it would be warmer and better, but he had no solid evidence that it would. In fact, later on in the book, the climate didn’t change at all the further south they went. The protagonist needed to keep a sense of false hope to keep going despite the facts around