The Road Mccarthy Analysis

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I believe that The Road challenges the notion of nostalgia by questioning the traditional veracity of memories and the worth of names, supporting the underlying meaning that human kind must look beyond the limitations of the past and transition to the immeasurable future. In The Road, regardless of accuracy, memory and narration creates realities. Naming and narrating are forms of authenticating and creating veracity for entities. The asyndeton “Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember” is the man’s acknowledgment that in an apocalyptic world where all is on the brink of extinction, names might be the only thing keeping concepts alive. Interestingly however, the man and the boy were not named in the novel. The only character named is Ely, who…show more content…
McCarthy’s double entrendre “They set out along the blacktop in gunmental light, shuffling in the ash, each the other’s world entire” refers to the man and the son being each other’s entire world, it is also alluding the concept that both represent their pre and post apocalyptic worlds. The man when teaching his son to read their road map says “These are our roads, the black lines on the map. The state roads” McCarthy careful choice of the word ‘state’ and the father’s description of ‘our roads’ indicates the man’s desire to preserve pre-apocalyptic concepts and allows himself to revisit and simultaneously show his son the places he recognised and grew up in as a child, revealing his own history. McCarthy exhibits the way the father attempts to re-order meaning or the structure of knowing from his old world onto the new world that his son will inherit. The man represents the human desire to live in the past and repeat history this is represented in the personification “people were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them.” McCarthy illustrates the change in the Man when he experiences his tomorrow “he thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.”, McCarthy’s use of the antithetical phrase “If trouble comes when you

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