By setting The Road in a post-apocalyptic setting McCarthy attempts at answering the question: what do you do if you had nothing left? That is the situation faced every day by the characters. Now, I'm not necessarily talking about material things here, though they lack those often enough as well. I'm talking about motivation, hope, a reason to live, a world to live in, people to live with. The survivors of this tragedy may still be alive, but to what end? To make it through another winter? To maybe, one day, see some sort of sign that things are getting better? They give themselves false hopes, something to sustain their spirits through the bleak and blackened world.
I'm not saying that McCarthy is trying to answer this sort of question in a practical sense, or as a preparation if the world does end. I think the question goes more broadly than that. There are certainly people out there living in conditions at least as bad as these. They certainly have nothing left. So what do they do? How do they stave off despair? How do they keep their spirits and hopes alive, when the everything around them tells them to just give in and die?
I'm not saying that McCarthy is trying to answer this sort of question in a practical sense, or as a preparation if the world does end. I think the question goes more broadly than that. There are certainly people out there living in conditions at least as bad as these. They certainly have nothing left. So what do they do? How do they stave off despair? How do they keep their spirits and hopes alive, when the everything around them tells them to just give in and die?
1 comment:
I agree with that question because they really had nothing to look foward to. Going through another winter would have definetely killed the man and his son. All they had was eachother.
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