Assignment #2

Topic One: Analyze a character from your novel whose mind is pulled in conflicting directions by two compelling desires, ambitions, obligations, or influences.

Cormac McCarthy, author of the novel The Road, creates a seemingly ceaseless journey in which a father and a son must choose between the desire to die, and the will to live. The boy has been contemplating death a throughout the journey for survival and he even asks his father “What would you do if I die?” in which the father replied “If you died I would want to die too.” (11). This conversation exposes the boys and the father’s inner thoughts. The sufferings that they have to endure don’t seem to be worth living for.  They’d rather lay down there life then to have to pick it up and carry the burden of this ceaseless suffering they call life.  All the while the boy and father are contemplating death; they are still in route to their fight to survive. This shows that deep down their inner-man is fighting to live. When the father was about to die of sickness he encouraged the boy to keep surviving by doing what he was taught. He worries about who will find him and his father foreshadows saying “Goodness will find the little boy, it always has and it will again.”(281).   After all the contemplating of wondering whether to live or die, the boy finally decides to fulfill a desire to live. He realized that he had come too far on this endless journey to give up.  Life will have its many challenges, but once a person realizes that they overcame all of their suffering, it makes it easier to know that they can continue to live.