Some are being held like cattle, waiting to be slaughtered and eaten by their captors. A catastrophe wiped out almost everything and the people that by chance survived are suffering horrible fates. It is not clear however if God exists in The Road. God is a very central topic of the novel. In this paper I want to discuss on how Cormac McCarthy treats the topics God, morals and justice in the post-apocalyptic setting of his prize-winning novel The Road and give insight on how these constructions work in general. It seems that McCarthy wants to hint that the good guys are being supported by some divine power. But somehow they are blessed with luck and coincidences ease the hard path they chose for themselves. It seems that solely the father and his son still believe in God and distinct between good and evil, which puts them in a huge disadvantage in the fight which is the survival of the fittest. The scenario of the story favors the unscrupulous slave holders, raiders, murderers and cannibals to come out on top though. For that to happen, one must assume that values and morals have not evolved by chance the way they did to create modern civilization but are inherent to the human nature so that even after the reset button was hit by a global catastrophe a civilized society can be restored.

Morals and virtue no longer have a place in this reality where people have to push past the most extreme boundaries, such as murder and cannibalism, to survive.īut with everything gone comes the opportunity to reestablish society, maybe an even better upgraded version of the old one. What arises from the ashes of a past civilization is a couple of lost souls struggling desperately for survival. This is one of the first sentences of the novel The Road, in which Cormac McCarthy depicts a world in which everything has been destroyed and the very fundaments of society have decayed and vanished. “With the first grey light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Is The Road a realistic prediction of the end of humanity?Ĥ. The connection between godly and good peopleģ.

Mccormack the road