The Road Themes

Although Cormac McCarthy is known as a connoisseur of excessive violence, we think most of the violent stuff in The Road is justified. McCarthy portrays a post-apocalyptic landscape where the scarc...

For all the violence and gore in The Road, there's a beautiful love story at its center. Given a post-apocalyptic setting, you might be imagining tough guys and scantily-clad women. Instead, we get...

the-road-part-8-the-flare-pistol McCarthy once said that he doesn't understand novelists who don't "deal with issues of life and death" (source). Well, he certainly practices what he preaches....

The Road is a fundamentally agnostic novel, meaning that some characters seem to believe in God and others seriously doubt God's existence. The protagonist of the novel flips back and forth on whet...

The isolation of the two main characters in The Road is pretty extreme. God has seemingly abandoned them, and they have totally lost contact with other decent people. For The Man, isolation compoun...

the-road-part-9-its-all-downhill In The Road, there are actual groups of "good guys" and "bad guys," which is somewhat surprising for a work of literary fiction. In the wake of a world catastro...

the-road-part-4-apocalypse Memory is something of a double-edged sword in The Road. The protagonist wants to remember the past, but when he does, he has trouble focusing on survival. Also, by...

Like most novels about survival, The Road exalts the resourcefulness of its protagonist. Resourcefulness becomes an enshrined skill, partly because it ensures the survival of loved ones. Resourcefu...

the-road-part-10-apocalyptic-dreamin Most of the "versions of reality" in The Road are dreams. McCarthy includes a hallucination or two and briefly makes fun of happy stories, but he mainly fo...

The world Cormac McCarthy describes in The Road is a cruel place. Compassion in this dog-eat-dog (or man-eat-man) world seems all the more precious. Granted, McCarthy mostly associates compassion w...