A scorched earth, an imprisoned sun, moon that can’t penetrate the darkness, men feast upon the bones of their counterpart and every piece of the world ever known to man, vanquished. Does this behoove hope and prosperity? Is this a new world coming of age or the world ceasing to exist? The Road by Cormac McCarthy is set in a post-apocalyptic world that follows the journey of a nameless man and his son south to the coast. They are escaping the freezing cold, as the man does not believe they will survive the upcoming winter. What else are they escaping? The past? The future? They could be escaping a past world in search of a new age or on a search for death to rescue them from this terrible world. The father’s journey is a unique one that consists…show more content… The man’s storytelling also “consider[s] the numerous strange rituals that have been reported from the primitive tribes and great civilizations of the past, it becomes apparent that the purpose and actual effect of these was to conduct people across those difficult thresholds of transformation that demand a change in the patterns not only of conscious but also unconscious mind” (Campbell, 10). The man engrains beliefs into his son’s unconscious mind and the conscious mind through his actions and stories of and old culture lost. The man offers his son a multitude of heroic stories with which his son might use to build upon and recreate a world of humanity (Cooper, 143). The myth of the world navel is “the effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world” (Campbell, 40). The man’s journey is complete when he dies and he has fully released his energy into his son who will revive the life of a world on the brink of