The Road Essay -- Literary Analysis, McCarthy

Why do you think McCarthy has chosen not to give his characters names? How do the generic labels of the man and the son doctor the way you /readers relate to them? While reading The Road, a novel written by Cormac McCarthy, I was jerked from the warmth, comfort, and safety of my home and thrown into a cold, dark, and utter(a) world, walking alongside the man and the boy. McCarthy composes his work so diagrammatically that readers are drawn right into the story. I believe Cormac McCarthy wanted the figures in this book to be universal, so that the reader could imagine him/her self as the boy or the man at any given moment, and to be able to feel as they do. To do this McCarthy did not designate the characters in his book with names, and because of this, I was able to connect with the man and the boy on a personal level and envision myself uniting with them in their chilling journey. As the reader, I was profoundly overwhelmed with many mixed emotions such as compas sion, sadness, happiness, disgust, remorse, and fear. I have pity for the characters in the book The Road, because the man and the boy have to pass day to day struggling to survive in a frigid bleak world where food is scarce They squatted in the road and ate rice and cold beans theyd cooked days ago. already beginning to ferment.(McCarthy 29). The landscape is blackened, and mankind is almost extinct The mummied dead everywhere.(McCarthy 24). As I read on I noticed myself connecting more indistinctly with the characters. When the boys mother takes her own life, I was deeply saddened and my total broke for the boy simply because his mom, someone he cherished and love so much, had given up on hope and faith and ramshackle him. I just wan... ..., I jumped in the bed got as exclude to my husband as possible and eventually drifted off to sleep. When I blameless reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I was astonished at how deep I was able to connect with the characters and the fact that this book touched me as deeply as it did. It also made me think what if? In frankness if this were to happen would I have the courage and strength of the man and the boy or would I be like the mother as McCarthy states it a faithless slut (57), who has taken death as a natural lover. Over all I personally believe that this novel was suddenly fantastic, even though I had nightmares for a few nights after I had completed the book. This just goes to show what a great writer McCarthy is, he touches his readers so deeply they even dream about his work. I would contumaciously pick up this book and read it again just for fun.