DAY 1

DAY 1

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel that follows the story of a father and his son as they attempt to survive in the apocalyptic environment the boy was born in, complete with cannibals, brutal winter, and absolutely no hope left at all for a better life. This is unrelated but if you really wanna get a sense of why I believe that the freedom of speech is a bad idea, go and look at the reviews for this book on Goodreads.com.

There are several themes throughout this novel, in religious nature usually, allowing for it to be interpreted through numerous perspectives, but from the postmodern perspective the themes of identity, a lack of knowledge of the truth, and the autobiographical nature of fiction.

Identity is usually assigned to a character at its most basic form through a name. We identify a character in our mind most commonly through their name, from which we can see and view their personality and character as a whole. The two main characters of The Road, however, are completely unnamed, and very few of the other characters that they do meet have names given to them. Identity here is presented as something adoptable, metamorphic, but also concrete. The father, no matter how progressively "dark" his actions become will always be the father. But the reader, with an individual and unique identity, is able to latch onto the father's identity because he is presented entirely from the name-defining role of the story. This also connects to the autobiographical nature of the story, as the author Cormac McCarthy dedicated this work to his son, and one must notice the several similarities between his and his son's age in comparison with the book characters. Before I forget, the last theme I wanted to mention was the lack of defined truth in this world. The main characters are guided by faith, in a world beyond this and the like, and faith by nature is a lack of knowing. The true nature of the apocalypse, whether or not the son is a prophet, whether or not the strangers encountered can be trusted, all of these questions have no defined truth within the book. They require inference, or a leap of faith, to define a subjective answer.

References today:

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. Print.