In the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a post-apocalyptic book about the journey of a father and his son. This journey took several months; they are going across a land that has been destroyed and much of the civilization has also been destroyed. In this quote it talks about how things are being forgotten by the human civilization such as colors, types of birds and certain foods. People are losing their values and their customs that were once so important to them. They are losing their objects, their memory and their principles that they had in place before this disaster took place. My reaction to this text is that how can these people forget everything that they once relied on so heavily? These values were once so important to them and then now they all of a sudden forget these important values. My reaction is that I feel bad for these people because it is almost as if these innocent people are suffering a type of amnesia from this horrific disaster. I feel sad because they can’t do anything about their memory loss; they are suffering from the effects on Earth that was caused by this disaster.
The purpose of this passage is to show the horrific effects that the people on Earth suffered due to this disaster which caused the man and the boy to set out on a journey across the landscape to try and survive. People are forgetting the things that they used to do on a normal basis, pretty soon the world will be corrupt (if it is not already corrupt) because of what has happened on the Earth. The civilization is in a disaster and the people are going crazy because of their memory loss. The specific techniques used to achieve this purpose are diction, rhetorical questions, imagery and short sentence structure. The diction in this passage helps to create the overall mood in this novel. The mood of sad is created through the way that the author writes his paragraphs and the tone that he uses. The use of rhetorical questions in this passage like “How much was gone already” presents the reader with a different view on things. Maybe it posses something different that the reader never thought of before or maybe it presents a different position on the situation. The imagery in this passage contributes to the senses of seeing and hearing. You can see the “world shrinking” and you can hear the “raw core” of parsible entities and the “birds.” The imagery helps the reader to paint a picture of the situation in his or her head. The short sentence structure helps contribute to the tone, the short sentences lead up to the dramatic parts of the book. The short sentences are little hints of bigger ideas and the reader reads right through them and holds their breath to wait for the bigger idea being presented. The overall effect of this passage is to show the tough times that the people in this society are facing because of the memory loss and the disaster that has taken place in their society.
So far in this novel the word human means to be degraded down in the society because you are suffering from memory loss because of the surrounding factors of your environment. The humans are suffering from a loss of memory because of the disaster and this is causing them to not be able to remember things that they used to be able to do on a daily basis. Our depictions of the future reveal that the present is more valuable than we may think. For example in this society everything was perfect until this disaster took place. The people had everything but now they are forgetting everything and are losing everything. People in this society took everything for granted because they thought that they would have it forever but not it is all gone and they are suffering. We use language and images to manipulate people’s minds by providing images that relate to the subject and then describing them in a different way than what they were presented in which causes the people’s minds to be confused.
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