Discussion Topic
Suitable books for a comparative essay with Cormac McCarthy's The Road
Summary:
Suitable books for a comparative essay with Cormac McCarthy's The Road include 1984 by George Orwell for its dystopian themes, Lord of the Flies by William Golding for its exploration of human nature, and Blindness by José Saramago for its portrayal of societal collapse. Each of these works provides rich thematic parallels and contrasts with The Road.
Which book is good to compare with The Road by Cormac McCarthy in an essay?
On the Beach by Neville Shute would be a great novel to pair with The Road. It is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia during the '60s. The characters know that the end of life is inevitable due to nuclear fallout, and the government even offers suicide pills to ease the suffering.
How about Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog? It's a great story about life in post-apocalyptic Australia with huge doses of dark humor not found in the ultra-serious The Road. Ellison's tale won the 1969 Nebula Award (Best Sci-Fi Novella) and the film version (starring Don Johnson) won a Hugo Award.
Without knowing the parameters of your assignment, I might suggest a comparison to the 19th century novel by Ivan Turgenev called Fathers and Sons ( 1862). The story traces the experience of who has become a nihilist and rejects his father's ways and...
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the old order of life. Bazarov's tragic and ironic end raises questions about moral responsibility and the correct order of life.
I wonder whether dystopian novels might be a good choice for you to think about for this comparison. Novels such as The Handmaid's Tale and even Lord of the Flies portray worlds where power has been seized by the few and is used and abused to make the lives of those without that power very miserable indeed. Choosing one of these books would allow you to compare the nature of a dystopian novel and what characterises this genre.
On first glance, it might be odd, but I think that a great comparison point between McCarthy's work might be Elie Wiesel's Night. If you are seeking to examine the dimensions of the father/ son relationship in both works, there will be much in way of points in convergence and divergence. I think that one can see a redemptive vision in McCarthy's work and see a more despairing vision in Wiesel's rendering. I think that it might be interesting to see how both writers see the strength of bonds towards family in periods of abject horror and personal struggle. The father/ son relationship in McCarthy's work is a sanctuary from the cruelty of the world. In Wiesel's work, the bond between father/ son becomes victim of the world around it. I think that being able to see how both writers see the strength and eventual withering of such bonds becomes vitally important to each author's view of the world and their fundamental understanding of how reality is constructed in the modern and postmodern setting. It might be a very interesting emotional dynamic to examine each work in how it treats the father/ son relationship.
What is a suitable book to compare with Cormac McCarthy's The Road for a comparative essay?
The kind of novel you seem to be looking for is an "apocalyptic" or "post-apocalyptic" novel -- a work that deals with some kind of earth-shattering change that transforms or even destroys civilization. Such novels deal either with the transformation itself or (as in The Road) with the aftermath of the transformation. Various lists have been compiled of such novels, including the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apocalyptic_and_post-apocalyptic_fiction
http://listverse.com/2009/02/12/10-great-post-apocalyptic-science-fiction-novels/
http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Post-Apocalyptic-Books/lm/2BH1R91R2OECF
http://www.apokalypsos.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=147&t=415
Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins might be worth a look, since Percy (like McCarthy) is a novelist of some stature outside of "genre fiction."
Is Wyndham's The Chrysalids an option for you? Wyndham writes about our world existing in a post-apocalypse time following what the story calls a Tribulation. The great thing on the minds of the characters in the community in the story is to preserve the physical definition, form and structure of a human being since nuclear fallout has devastated and laid waste to the land. A new civilization rises up to challenge the defined order and they predict that the inevitable end of the challenge will be total destruction of the old and the supremacy of the new.
Just to go for a completely different idea, you might like to consider Blindness by Jose Saramago. What makes me think of this novel is the way that both it and The Road present a very bleak picture indeed of human nature and the way that when civilisation is stripped away, we prey on each other and use and abuse each other to ensure our own survival. At the same time, however, both novels contain something of an element of hope in the face of this rather unpalatable truth about the nature of being human.
What a great project. Since The Road is an apocalyptic book, it might be interesting to compare another apocalytic books with a different point of view. From this perspective, how about the book of Revelation from the Bible? It is the vision that John the apostle saw on the island of Patmos about what is to come. There are three benefits of using the book of Revelation.
First, the book of Revelation is an ancient book that has endured the test of time. In other words, it still speaks to people today. Keep in mind that the Bible is the bestseller year after year.
Second, the imagery of the book of Revelation is rich. In fact, it draws upon the rest of the Bible. Hence, you will not be able to exhaust it at all. In other words, you will have a wealth of material with which to work.
Third, the contrasts between the two work are so great that a number of interesting questions can be asked. Scholars for example has compared the poetry of the Roman poet Vergil to the apostle John.