When exploring the challenges and toils of survival, we can easily make a series of comparisons between the design of Francis Lawrence’s and Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic worlds in I Am Legend and The Road, respectively. Both plots involve...

Cormac McCarthy has created a tradition in American literature of violence and desolation, his work dismembering American myth and replacing it with a brutal, epic and often uncomfortable reality. In The Road McCarthy maintains the hallmarks of...

The 1990s and early 2000s were full of revolutionary changes in society, and heralded some of the changes in technology usage and social norms that still define our lives today. Cormac McCarthy is an accomplished, acclaimed, and rather dark...

If a student tells his or her teacher that adhering to grammatical rules proves unnecessary to acceptable writing, the teacher would in all likelihood balk at the student’s claim and continue reinforcing the need for proper punctuation. If someone...

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, family becomes the central theme that shapes the world in the novel. A reader follows the story of the single-parent family: the father and his son travel across the post-apocalyptic land and fight for their...

Texts written in the After the Bomb period represent the personal and political consequences of an era. George Clooney’s Good Night And Good Luck, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, and Oliver Stone’s film,...

In Okorafor’s Who Fears Death and McCarthy’s The Road, both protagonists encounter a spiritual journey in their apocalyptic scenario, emphasizing the importance of religion in the post-apocalyptic world. In the novels, the characters experience...

Many people accept that individuals’ morals, beliefs, and ideas are with them from birth; that it is in each person’s nature to behave the way they do. However, an equally powerful source of one’s ideology stems from their surroundings, and those...

Tennessee Williams once said “If people behaved in the way nations do, they would all be put in straightjackets.” Nowhere can this be more clearly seen than in the case of Lester Ballard from Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. Lester Ballard, through...

“The strangeness of the story of Lester Ballard, the child of God, begins not with its subject

matter but with the way the story is told.”

Vereen Bell, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy

In his 1991 essay, Andrew Bartlett suggests Cormac...

Both Caldwell’s Tobacco Road and McCarthy’s Child of God concern themselves with quintessential poor white people. Tobacco Road follows the Lester family, a poor family on the outskirts of town, struggling for food and money during the Great...

In Child of God, Cormac McCarthy presents readers with the story of Lester Ballard, a young man abandoned by and expelled from society. Ballard’s is a gothic tale overflowing with depravity, libidinal pressure, necrophilia, and psychopathy, yet it...

In literature, hawks have evolved into a symbol for power and freedom. As they roam the great American landscape, writers have come to admire their strength and control. In Robinson Jeffers’ “Hurt Hawks,” the speaker comes across a wounded hawk...

Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men follows the story of a drug deal gone wrong. Four Mexican men are found dead at the scene of the crime but the money is nowhere to be found. The novel focuses on Llewelyn Moss, the Texan welder who stumbled...

Money is arguably one of the oldest social conventions still utilized in the world, constantly expanding its influence on mankind. Money once bought forgiveness and respect; today, one can purchase influence in government and even extend life with...

Every text represents an experience that both the author and the reader jointly construct; the author writes the details, drawing from empirical influence, and the reader filters those details through his or her own experience. When the reader is...

The Significance of Violence in No Country for Old Men As is true with most of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, No Country for Old Men is replete with scenes of violence. This novel, which is set in the chaotic and lawless borderland between Texas and...

The 1990s and early 2000s were full of revolutionary changes in society, and heralded some of the changes in technology usage and social norms that still define our lives today. Cormac McCarthy is an accomplished, acclaimed, and rather dark...

Many have tried, but few directors have been able to adapt famed author Cormac McCarthy’s works for the screen. At best, a film like 2007’s No Country for Old Men is made; at worst, 2013’s The Counselor, which is widely regarded as one of the ten...

American author Cormac McCarthy is well-known for unflinchingly examining the moral state of humanity within his writing. His works seldom offer any justification or redemption, leaving readers to equally ponder the sense and senselessness, the...