Cormac Mccarthy The Road Analysis

In modern society, we as humans don’t typically have to worry about meeting our fundamental needs. Because the majority of people are born into loving families, it is common to live a comfortable life. Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who is known for his theory of psychological health based on the fulfillment of essential human needs by priority, resulting in self-actualization. As he developed his theory of the essential human needs, he created the well-known Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Because of the rarity of life-altering disasters, most of society has never experienced a loss of their fundamental needs, therefore allowing us to have humanity in the form of a moral compass. What keeps us human is love and relationships, and when you experience a complete loss of those, you lose your moral humanness.
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, we get to know two characters; a father and a son. Throughout the story we
We can conclude that this means the majority of the remaining human population is alone as well. Because there is a huge lack of trust in their state of society, there doesn’t appear to be any relationships between non-family members. “Well, I dont think we're likely to meet any good guys on the road.” (McCarthy 224.) The lack of relationships is detrimental to completely establishing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs resulting in their negative reaction to their conditions. In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm shares his theory of the ways in which we can achieve the third tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs- love and belonging. Fromm’s attempt to determine our most basic need in life results in his theory that a man’s greatest need is “union” or “togetherness.” Man must have this in order to escape from the feeling of aloneness. The experience of being alone, or the lack of unity, Fromm states, is the central cause of anxiety and