Rhetoric Study

The most standout and clearly used rhetorical device in The Road was imagery. Throughout the entire novel McCarthy used imagery to convey the feeling of bleak despair in the main character's situation. The text uses words such as bleak, grey, dark and other shadowy, negative feeling words to emphasize the mood and the setting the majority of the book takes place in. McCarthy also uses more positive, godly words when describing or involving the two main characters. instead of 'black' words, he uses 'white' words, such as golden, light, and clean. the difference between these words and the way McCarthy describes the scenes that the characters experience both provide perfect mental visualizations of the author's ideas, they also continue to separate the main theme that the world is bad, and the Man and the Boy are good.