Theme Of Isolation In The Lonely Road

I Walk This Lonely Road
“On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world” (McCarthy 32). Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a novel set in a post-apocalyptic world, follows a father and son throughout their journey in a new world in which they hope to survive. McCarthy uses imagery, God, the characters themselves, and the structure of the novel to implement the theme of isolation in The Road.
Imagery, a strong presence in The Road, assists in the creation of the theme. The novel is filled with descriptive images of the “ashen scabland” (15) the world has become. The land is “gullied and eroded and barren. The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes” (177). McCarthy’s use of
Take, for example, the mother in the novel. The mother is similar to the man in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. Frost’s poem is about a man who has to decide between two roads in the woods. The man chose a road and saved the second for another day, but knew that he probably wouldn’t come back. The road chosen was the one less people traveled on “and that has made all the difference” (Frost l. 20). This concept can be applied to the boy’s mother in the story because the mother has a choice between life and death, between the terrifying, new world and nothingness. The mother chooses “the one less traveled by” (Frost l. 19). When everyone is fighting for survival, the mother chooses the path fewer people took, which is suicide. Also, similar to the man in the poem, there is no coming back and her choice has made a great difference because her life has completely changed: she is dead without her child and husband. Another character that is isolated in the novel is the father. Critic Alan Warner states, “His [McCarthy’s] central character can adopt a universal belligerence and misanthropy. In this damnation, rightly so, everyone, finally, is the enemy” (Warner). The father trusts no one, just like Ely, and without trust there is no communication with others, no feeling of companionship, only isolation. The son is also a character who lives isolated from human beings. The son is more trusting than his father, yet he isn’t allowed to talk to others because his father says it is not safe. Therefore, the son is just as isolated as the father. His father is the only person the boy has in his life and even that companionship doesn’t last forever because the father dies. The father’s death leaves the boy on his own. The boy relies on his father for everything: for food, for clothing, and for survival. The boy told his father, “You said you wouldnt ever leave me [sic]” (McCarthy 279), but that is a