Character Analysis: The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

How would you deal with losing everything that matters to you? What would you do if you had nothing to live for anymore? In the book The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a man and his son fight to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world. They are following a road headed south, and along the way they encounter countless obstacles both physical and emotional. While the son displays innocence, looking to help the few people they come across, the man is conscious of the change from the world he once knew to now. Throughout the novel, by portraying the boy as a God like figure and highlighting characters’ opinions on religion, McCarthy shows that while things may seem bleak, faith can lead you out to the light.
In this novel, characters have different views
Towards the end of the novel, the man’s health takes a turn for the worst. He is constantly coughing, and coughing up blood at that. He has also begun to lose track of time (although he barely had any track of it to begin with): “The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared,” (273). However, through all of this, the man finds a positive. When he stops to rest, the man looks at his son and sees, “him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle,” (273). This glow refers to the earlier comparisons between the boy and God earlier in the book. The glow the boy has represents a holy, spiritually glow that only a god could possess. The boy is one of the few beauties that remain in the world because of his innocence and good nature. He provides a sense of hope for mankind that one day they can return to their civilized ways and care for one another like the boy
This time, the man is on his death bed. He is no longer eating or drinking, as he knows that it would only be a waste. The boy tries to give him some water, and the man tells him to save it for him for later. The boy then, “took the cup and moved away and when he moved the light moved with him… look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right,” (277). Like earlier in the book, the light that surrounds the boy represents his pure goodness. The man suggests that the boy honors all prophets who had come before. That his pureness surmounted that of anyone else.
McCarthy’s novel had many spiritual references with in it. It questioned whether or not a higher power exists through Ely the elderly man. And it also shows how higher power can exist within mortals through the boy. This balance between both perspectives helps to push the novel forward by making the conversation about more than just survival in a non-survivable world. It adds to the meaning of the text, and forces readers to think about the deeper meanings of the events in the