Assignment 2

The knowledge that each life has an end can be the defining future of the human condition. As death is an uncomfortable subject, it must be confronted sooner or later. Nothing can fully prepare a person for it since it can unfold relentlessly or strike unexpectedly, even if survival is endeavor. Cormac McCarthy catastrophic fiction The Road illuminates the literacy work as a whole by implementing the hope of survival post apocalypse events as unfolding the steady demise of the father, day by day until his journey comes to an end.

After years of exposure to danger, coldness, and days that only grew darker, the father deceits the reality that he is slowly dying from his son. He does this with the purpose to give hope to his son, whom has been his primary concern since the he was born. McCarthy uses this to help develop the relationship of the son and the father as a mutual one: The son is the father's reason to keep struggling through the bitterness of the dark days and the father is the son's guidance to survival. As they keep going on their journey, the man “woke in the cold dark coughing and he coughed until his chest was raw,” (186). As the novel progresses, the father’s health only gets worse. He is aware he is dying; however, he keeps enduring the hardships of his health to provide what his son needs to survive: hope. While the novel develops, the fire which consumes the life out of nature and slowly deteriorates the world can be incorporated to the father’s condition as he slowly approaches his demise. However, the meaning of fire is far more complex than what it was intended at the beginning. It comes to stand for the hope of survival to both of the main characters. The author creates various comparison of the father’s life equivalent to the fire been comparable to his life slowly extinguishing, like a flame which eventually will be burnt out. It can also be assimilated to, “The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern […] like the shape of a flower, a molten rose,” (47).  The burning paper is meant to represent the father leaving the hope in his son’s heart, the shape of the rose, needed for survival. This concept can be contemplated in this literacy work. Even after the father dies the son promises, “I’ll talk to you every day, he whispered, and I won’t forget, no matter what,” (286). The intensity of the struggle to keep his son alive forces the father to make meaningful pessimistic choices, and yet loving. The son comes to grasp his father’s efforts as the father dies, and realizes he must keep pursuing survival as his father taught him. The trust he had in his father comes to contribute as the meaning of the work is played out through the relationship of boy and man. A meaning which he promises he won’t forget.  McCarthy develops the boy as an extension of hope in a world that has been devoured in adversity.

Nowadays, one can endure hardships when they have learned the meaning of life, especially when learned from a loved one. What one comes to know is what will define the future of that human being or of another. In the case of some people, or many, the realization of the hope they have in life is only recognized when a loved one dies. A death can push a person to strive to fulfill the wish of the person they lost, and in many cases, they live up to that wish.