Works Of Literature In The Road Novel English Literature Essay
Contemporary authors are influenced by those who preceded them in terms of both the form and content of their works. This is evident in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. McCarthy chooses not to imitate those greats that came before him such as Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Tennyson in terms of form; in fact, he deliberately avoids almost all conventional choices in terms of form. However, he is obviously influenced by their ideas. He ties together Wordsworth’s concern at his society losing touch with nature and Tennyson’s exploration of what a society’s priorities should be. He creates a world in which civilization has dissolved and the ecosystem is in chaos. It is implied that the society has lost touch with nature and this has resulted in the death of global civilization. His goal seems to be to awaken the world to the impact that humans have had on the environment and how that can or perhaps will be the source of our downfall.
This concern is comparable to the fears of many in the environmental movement that humanity is destroying the natural world and unless drastic changes are made now, this degradation will be permanent. Many prominent politicians in the United States, such as Al Gore, author of An Inconvenient Truth, include environmental responsibility as a core aspect of their political platform. Indeed, in Europe there are many parties whose only focus is environmentally responsible legislation. The Green Party United States of America believes that capitalism’s focus on profit rewards disposable products which are not ecologically sustainable and the focus on personal gain precludes any efforts to make a societal change for the betterment of the earth (Ten Key Values).
The Road is a novel which is significant in that it calculatingly eschews traditional poetic forms such as those utilized by Wordsworth and Tennyson and instead is in an arrangement that is more commonly read today....