The Pitfalls of Thinking - The Road essays

The Pitfalls of Thinking - The Road essays The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is a story of a post-apocalyptic world seen through the eyes of a father and son, while traveling in a seemingly desolated environment searching for a civilized society. The Road portrays what is left of the world and its inhabitants in a cold, unforgiving, and depressing manner. Traveling the road the father and son strive to carry the fire with them as they keep pushing on through what seems to be a futile and endless journey. Many characters in The Road are depicted as savages who have resorted to barbaric and cannibalistic methods in order to survive the environment they are placed in, which no longer contains any type of plant growth or animal food source, except humans. While traveling down the road, many of the characters in the story have resorted to survival by any means necessary, in doing so they have forgotten what it means to be human, thus creating many pitfalls in their thinking. The father in The Road creates many errors in his thinking that become recognizable and pointed out to him more and more by his son as the story progresses. The error of perspective the father makes the most is their error of the either or outlook. There are many factors to consider in thinking about surviving in a post-apocalyptic society. The father tells his son that they are the good guys while the cannibalistic murdering characters are the bad guys. The father tells the son that the good guys carry the fire, which represents internal human strength in the form of qualities as hope, perseverance, and resilience as well as morality, and the ability to retain ones humanity in the face of ultimate destruction and evil. The father explains to his son that there are either good guys or bad guys in this post-apocalyptic society. Unfortunately, their situation does not exactly lend themselves to such clear cut definitions of these terms and the son begins to realize this. Along their journey the son begins to c...