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Post Apocalyptic
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Reading With Mad Max: 7 of the Finest Apocalyptic NovelsThe Walking Dead. 28 Days Later. The Hunger Games. As readers, we are drawn to apocalyptic stories for many reasons, like the constant chatter about global warming or our melting ice caps. The endgame is part of our social consciousness, as it should be. But it’s also kind of fun, in a way, to imagine what we’d do when facing a calamity like in The Maze Runner or World War Z. Do we stop and help our fallen friend as the zombies close in, or turn and flee?
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Apocalypse literature now, and thenHumanity has always imagined its own destruction. Each generation believes the end is somewhere round the corner, and our catastrophic fantasies are a good barometer of what's currently troubling us. Thousands of years ago, we heard about a flood sent by God to flush out his people in their sinfulness; later, the Book of Revelations forecast all sorts of grisly finales. The truth of imminent calamity was all around us; it was just a case of seeing. The word "apocalypse" derives from the Greek "to uncover".
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Genre Guide: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction for TeensDefinition
Post-apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction. For a novel to be post-apocalyptic, the setting must be one where the end of the world has already taken place and characters are trying to survive and start anew. The end of the world event that occurred can be anything from war, to plague, to natural or man made disasters. Post-apocalyptic fiction differs from apocalyptic fiction, where the end of the world is currently taking place and the characters and fighting to survive it.
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Themes
Death and Violence
In the post-apocalyptic setting of The Road, almost all animals, plants, and humans have died off because of some unnamed disaster. Because of this, death is a constantly looming figure – the land and sea are covered in darkness and ashes, nothing grows, and dead bodies litter the landscape. Death is so universally present that it is often personified as a character, like the woman describing her decision to commit suicide as taking death as her “new lover.” The man, too, is slowly dying, as he coughs up progressively more blood. The entire setting and plot of The Road illustrate the apparent entropy of the earth and all life, and death must be taken into account in every action the characters take.
Familial Love
As there are only two main characters, a father and a son, The Road’s principal relationship is one of paternal love. The man and boy are “each the other’s world entire,” and it is only the man’s love for the boy that gives him the will to persevere. Their love is generally of the stark, silent kind, as the pair’s whole existence consists of surviving from one day to the next. Never in the book does either one say “I love you,” but when he has the chance the man shows his love in other ways, as by giving the boy a Coca-Cola. For his part, the boy constantly looks to his father for reassurance, safety, and some kind of order in his chaotic world.
Survival and Perseverance
Much of the action of The Road consists of the protagonists’ daily struggle to survive. This creates a mood of constant suspense as death looms always overhead, and most other humans have turned to cannibalism. One of the novel’s central questions then is why to persevere in such a hellish existence. The man’s reason to keep struggling comes to him as the idea of “carrying the fire”: an idea that seems to consist, for him, of preserving the goodness or civilization of mankind by maintaining his basic humanity, having the strength to refrain from murder and cannibalism, and prioritizing a sense of love and protection for the boy’s compassion and naiveté. The woman, on the other hand, considers death better than living in the post-apocalyptic world.
Faith, Trust, and Doubt
In the harsh world of The Road, everything depends on trusting or distrusting each other. On one level, there is a constant tension regarding whether or not the man should trust anyone he meets on the road. Some people are cannibals and rapists, while others will still steal to survive. The boy is more trusting than the man, as he is always trying to help people and give away precious food. This trustingness is part of both the boy’s naiveté and purity – he has a basic faith in humanity that transcends his immediate world of brutality.
Dreams and Memory
The present world of The Road is dark and full of death, and the only real color appears in the man’s dreams and memories. When he or the boy have nightmares they are just an extension of the present, where the worst has already happened, but in his good dreams the man returns to his happy memories of the past, and the world of nature and his wife. The boy never experienced the pre-apocalyptic world, so he has no such memories. The man’s dream-memories offer him a kind of escapism that he often avoids, as they seem like a temptation to “give up” or die, but at the same time these memories are one of the reasons the man keeps persevering. For him, part of “carrying the fire” means carrying the memory of a better world.
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The Road Study Guide
Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides. -
The Road Cormac McCarthy
The novel begins with the man and boy in the woods, the boy asleep, as the two of them are making their journey along the road. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world, date and place unnamed, though the reader can assume it's somewhere in what was the United States because the man tells the boy that they're walking the "state roads." -
The Road Summary & Study Guide
An unnamed father and son walk south in search of the good guys, the people that are not raping, killing and eating other humans to stay alive. They ransack abandoned houses for clothes and food, which they push around in their cart, moving from place to place to avoid detection. America, and, as far as they understand, the rest of the world, has been wiped out by a virus. A few people remain, but the ones that do, fight desperately for their own survival. -
Post-Apocalyptic Literature: Definition & Books
Video games, movies, television--post-apocalyptic literature is right under our noses, and you might not have even realized it! Before you start prepping the bunker, you'll want to check out this lesson, where you'll learn more about this often worriedly realistic genre and get to explore some post-apocalyptic scenarios!
Reviews
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The road to hellShorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy's other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America.
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Left BehindCormac McCarthy’s subject in his new novel is as big as it gets: the end of the civilized world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all. He has written a visually stunning picture of how it looks at the end to two pilgrims on the road to nowhere. Color in the world — except for fire and blood — exists mainly in memory or dream.
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Cormac McCarthy's The Road May Have the Scariest Passage in All of LiteratureMcCarthy's is an elemental voice. In his voice I hear stone shifting, glaciers cracking open, trees moaning in the wind. The ancient cadences of his prose take on an almost otherworldly quality, a quality that transports you. I'm constantly in awe of the language and recognizing how he's putting together his sentences so exquisitely.
SYMBOLISM - THE ROAD - Cormac McCarthy
