In this part of the novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy you see the world suffering worse than it has ever been. They are starting to realize that there is no hope for the people on Earth or the Earth. It is just going to disappear one day and be gone. The people are hopeless and anyone that has survived so far is considered to be very lucky because they can’t believe anybody could survive in these harsh conditions like it has been. In this quote it says that the Earth is still “cold” and it is not welcoming its survivors, it is only getting colder and colder, it is as if the Earth is being “relentless” and it wants to kill everybody on Earth. Whatever caused this disaster on Earth has left the Earth a dead wasteland, there will be no future on the Earth and there is going to be no survival. My reaction to this text is that I believe that the man and his son are going to find a way to beat the odds and they are going to survive. I believe this because you never see the main characters die in a book because it defeats the purpose and because I believe that they are going to find “A Road” to travel down upon where they will find life and a land that they can live. It just wouldn’t be right for them to die. I also feel bad for the victims that couldn’t survive and make it through these harsh conditions, the way that this passage is describing the Earth after the disaster is unbearable and I cannot imagine trying to have to survive on this type of wasteland.
The purpose of this passage is to show how bad the living conditions were on Earth after the disaster stricken. It’s unbelievable to me how the man and his son were able to survive these conditions. I guess it goes back to your will to believe that you can survive. Earlier in the book the man’s wife said to him before she committed suicide that they will survive as long as the man shows strength, care, and love to his son. So this reminds me of someone’s will and courage to survive, if you put your mind to it and believe that you will survive then you will be able to get through anything. The specific techniques used to achieve this purpose were imagery, word choice, tone, and similes. The imagery in this passage is great; it really provides the reader with a good mental/vivid picture in their head with a description of what is going on in the scene. For example the imagery in this passage shows what the Earth looks like after the disaster, “Cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground foxes in their cover. There is imagery throughout that whole passage, it is very descriptive and there is more than one visual image that you can picture in that portion of the passage. You can see the cold relentless earth, you can see the darkness, you can see and hear the blind dogs in their running, you can picture the crushing black vacuum that the Earth now looks like, and you can see and hear the trembling animals that were compared to the ground foxes. The diction/word choice helps to contribute to the tone and the mood of the passage. The negatively connotated words like “darkness, cold relentless, dark, crushing black vacuum, and trembling” all suggest a sorrow tone in the passage. When you think of these words you think of bad things, just like in this passage when they are describing what the Earth looks like now after the destruction. The tone in this passage is a sorrow/mournful tone; you get sad that these people had to deal with these harsh conditions. The simile in this passage is comparing the two hunted animals that were trembling to ground foxes. “Somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground foxes in their cover.” This simile shows how much destruction that was on the Earth because even the animals were feeling the effects of this disaster not just the people on the Earth, even the animals couldn’t survive this disaster. The overall effect of this passage is it shows how much destruction really took place on the Earth and it shows what the Earth like after it got destroyed, it was a deserted wasteland with dead people everywhere.
In this novel so far the word “human” means that you are getting killed on the Earth, you cannot suffer through the pain that you are going through anymore because the disaster is too great to survive through. Most likely you are going to die and the Earth is going to be gone, it is going to have no future and nobody living on it. In this book the word “human” is not something to be proud of because your species is being eliminated by the Earth. Our depictions of the future reveal that the Earth is going to be one day a disaster and we can already see how we are treating the Earth badly and the negative effects that it is going to have on us one day by the way we treat it. We are already starting to see the Earth being affected, with warmer winters, global warming, pollution, melting of the ice caps and overpopulation. We use language and images to manipulate people’s minds by providing content that is not fake to certain situations to make them believable.
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