Fear Can Make Us Do Hideous Things

In The Road by Cormac McCarthy the two main characters are a man and a boy. The man and the boy are starting to get desperate. They have been living for about 6 years in a world that is completely burned and turned to ash. They survive by scavenging non perishable food from burnt towns and cities, but it is getting hard to find anything. They are not the only survivors. The "bad guys" have taken to cannibalism to survive. They roam the streets in packs and carry their human prisoners, or food, with them as they go.

A full summary of The Road can be found here.

One day the man and the boy come across a house that clearly has people living in it but appears to be empty at the moment. Having had nothing to eat in s few days the man decides to take and chance and go inside to try and find food. He finds a locked cellar door hoping it is a food storage place. He and the boy walk inside and this is what they find;

"Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.
   Jesus, he whispered.
   Then one by one they turned and clinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us."

He was right, it was a food storage place, just not the kind of food he was hoping for. As the man and the boy are leaving they see four men and two women walking through a field toward the house. They run as fast as they can to avoid being eaten.

I want to focus on the cannibals. What drove them to cannibalism? In my opinion it was fear. They were so afraid to die that they decided to eat other human beings to survive. To me this shows what a powerful force fear can be on our lives. There's even a saying "don't let fear rule your life". I think in this case the cannibals allowed fear to rule their lives. They gave up their morals due to fear. They torment other people just so that they can survive. In this case it was the fear of death that caused the four men and two women to become cannibals.

Intro Post

Hello world! This is the blog of a senior literature and composition student. let's see, I play Fairview lacrosse, play disc golf, and am a bit of a math and science nerd. In this blog I will post about the most important shenanigans I experience.