Paradigms in Subconscious Realities
Paradigms in Subconscious Realities Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, conveys a father and his son traveling the roads of what is left from the earth-shattering events that led to the world consumed in flames of evil and death devouring the good and humanity until what remained of mankind was forsaken to walk in the ash of morals and rationality that would mask the earth in darkness. As the father and son scavenge in the remnants of cities, they are faced with trials of reason, sordid cannibalism, and scarring images of the ill repute. These trials prove dreadfully obstinate juxtaposed to modern situations that need coping with. By means of these variations of reality, the man relives his pasts, nightmares, and subconscious intrusions on his life. Cormac McCarthy relates a theme of envisages that relays the devastation of the society in which only peace in one’s mind can lead to surrendering to a personified death among the man and child by constant use of abetting diction and uncanny imagery. In the opening of the novel, the man is conjured with a dream where he ruminates, “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death” (26). McCarthy contrasts the dreams to reality, and the impact that one has on another. The author personifies death in a manner in which it cries out to the man, the intensifying diction used in this quote relays how demoralizing society is, when one is longing for impermanence. The man “dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds”(26). The father knows of the tranquil world that once was and that of which might await him, if he surrenders his soul. The son is also mentioned to notify that the man wants to raise his son in a nature and peace related world unlike that of which they are damned to trek. The “sirens” are exemplifications of death in