Death
The theme I have chosen is death because it one of the major themes and settings in “The Road”.
“Death and the specter of death pervade The Road from the onset through descriptions of the landscape, the protagonists' struggle to survive, and the constant threats of murder and starvation. The earth is already steeped in death and ashes. Most living creatures and plants have not survived the disaster that has destroyed civilization. For example, cows are extinct, and the boy has never before seen birds or fish. "On the hillsides old crops dead and flattened. The barren ridgeline trees raw and black in the rain" (18).
Death is also personified as a lover (48) and as an entity which will meet its own demise (146).
As the novel progresses, the reader becomes more acutely aware that the man is dying. "In the night he woke in the cold dark coughing and he coughed till his chest was raw.... He knelt there wheezing softly, his hands on his knees. I am going to die, he said. Tell me how I am to do that" (148). His encroaching death, evidenced by his worsening cough and the increasing amounts of blood he spits out, stalks the reader.
Even descriptions with rich colors and textures serve as reminders of death. When the man dreams of his wife, of his life before the universal destruction, he considers these dreams to be the call of death beckoning him from the bleak reality of his present life. These brief passages throughout The Road only highlight the world's inertial motion towards death, a force that also seems to drive the protagonists on their journey, especially for the father.”
“McCarthy has said that death is the major issue in the world and that writers who don’t address it are not serious. Death reaches very near totality in this novel. Billions of people have died, all animal and plant life, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea are dead: “At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.” Forest fires are still being ignited (by lightning? other fires?) after what seems to be a decade since that early morning — 1:17 a.m., no day, month or year specified — when the sky opened with “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” The survivors (not many) of the barbaric wars that followed the event wear masks against the perpetual cloud of soot in the air. Bloodcults are consuming one another. Cannibalism became a major enterprise after the food gave out. Deranged chanting became the music of the new age.”
“But the man is a zealot, pushing himself and the boy to the edge of death to achieve their unspecified destination, persisting beyond will in a drive that is instinctual, or primordial, and bewildering to himself. But the tale is as biblical as it is ultimate, and the man implies that the end has happened through godly fanaticism.”
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