Marina Armstrong

O Connor
Honors English
27 August 2015

I wash a dead mans brain out of his hair. That is my job(McCarthy 74).
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy is a story of a man and his son who walk through an
unimaginable hell. Everything is gray, ash replaces rain, and the sky is dark; America is
nothing but a burnt wasteland. In this futuristic novel, McCarthy gives an idea of what
the world could become and how people can change as the world around them
changes. In a place where no hope remains, a man and his boy continue to survive off
of the love they share for each other.
The man and his boy are sustained solely by their love, without it they would die.
Death surrounds the two everywhere they go, constantly reminding them of their fate.
Throughout the novel the author shows how hard surviving is and how death is an easy
way out and how for the man, the boy was all that stood between him and
death(McCarthy 29). In this new world there is no beauty, no grace, there is nothing
that humans value most; All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to
ones heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he
whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you(McCarthy 54). The only thing that the man
has to hold onto that is beautiful and delicate is his boy. Together they create a different
kind of beauty, a beauty that shows how there can be good in a place so brutal.

The Road is a story of an endless journey and survival. It is a story of a place

where there is no hope, nothing to cling to and yet a man and his son continue to
struggle on. McCarthy shows the reader what it would be like in a world so brutal and
pitiless but yet so real and vivid. In this futuristic spectrum, America is not a place of
good, it is filled with people who were changed by grief and anger. The Road expresses
the ultimate destructiveness of human beings but also of the good that can emerge
from love.