Assignment Two

                   Cormac McCarthy's solemn fiction The Road  incorporates a character's demise to further emphasize that nature of isolation can cause individuals to abandon moral values and consequently espouse an austere attitude toward even loved ones. The struggle of survival in the days where "each day [was] greyer than the one before" causes the man and his son to develop loss of hope for the world. (McCarthy P.3) McCarthy's reflection on the depth of the color gray introduces the prominence to absence of life. The color gray symbolizes the demolished civilization and the destructive activities of people which unfortunately worsened as time progressed. Emotional distress is constantly displayed when the man returns to old memories of his wife where "she was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift." (McCarthy P.38) This statement reveals the severity of indifference among people that even a mother of a child will relinquish her family due to anger derived from loss of hope. Society's ruination influenced the mother to be forbidding towards the man and the little boy which once again is a symbolism to the color grey. Furthermore, people displayed divergence as some identified themselves as the "good guys" and some as the "bad guys". A bad guy is described as someone who "wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an ill-formed notion of their appearance."(McCarthy P.102) This imagery gives the categorization of individuals who perform harmful actions only for his or her selfish benefit rather than surviving with upright effort. Much of these foul actions were of cannibalism and theft that would not be acceptable in a normally functioning society. Ultimately, individuals are cynical human beings seeking to obtain what is best for him or herself at no limits.