The Road and The Fall

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their context and, through the literary process of extrapolation, creatively reconfigure these issues by placing them in a new context that generally exaggerates the extremities of said issue. In many ways these technique borrows from the ancient rhetorical technique of reductio ad absurdum, and the re-appropriation of this particular technique is itself a microcosm for the mechanisms of the authors in general.

In the post-modernist The Road there are many competing, but valid, claims as to the issue within society that McCarthy is attempting to recontextualise.

In a 2006 work of literary criticism Jonathan Cant wrote that The Road was a text concerned with debunking the myth of american exceptionalism. This essay believes that this is a valid reading, and argues that it is validated in three ways.

Firstly, the materialistic nature of modern America is likened to the �barbarous gangs of cannibals� whose injudicious, Machivellian approach to their fallen society parallels ...

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purpose and, while it provides pleasure, is surreptitiously bad. It is thus a metaphor for American culture, and to that end its state of irrelevance and impermanence within this book demonstrates that American permanence is a myth.

McCarthy is specifically projecting his conception of good and bad onto the audience through his attack on this particular notion. Having experienced issues like Hurricane Catrine and 9/11, McCarthy�s context is one that doesn�t accept America is �exceptional�, and through repurposing not only is this myth debunked, but it is outrightly shown to be evil. In this way McCarthy�s creation of a fallen world in response to context argues that even in a ...

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