Eksistentialisme i 'The Road' og 'Ode to a Nightingale'

The life of Sisyphus is a tragic one. Sisyphus was punished by the gods by being forced to push a big rock up a hill, but when the rock finally reached the top, the rock would roll down the other side. This would keep on happening for Sisyphus and he would time after time try to push the rock up the hill but without any luck. Luckily for Sisyphus, this is only a myth, and he never got to experience the consequences of the absurdity in this meaningless duty. In the movie “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, we are witnesses to the existential angst and absurdity which can make a man go mad.

In this post-apocalyptic world, humanity is as far gone as hope is. This world knows nothing more than nothingness. It is a fathers’ journey to salvation, but in this instance, salvation is just more nothingness. We follow two nameless characters, a father and a son. A clear example of the existential angst and the absurd is when the mother decides to leave them. She decides to give up, to commit suicide in the dark forest, she is the counterexample to the man because she can’t adjust to this new brutal world. Camus describes suicide to be the most rational thing to do when everything seems to be meaningless, that’s why the only way out of the pain is by ending your life. Despite seeing strangers throughout their journey choosing the same faith as the mother, the man keeps on going, searching for some kind of hope. Every encounter are victims of the existential angst, they all know that the rest of their lives are meaningless, this is also why we see such horrible scenes, where people have lost humanity completely, the cannibalism and all the hanging is just a way to cope with it. There is also a lot of biblical references, for instance, it is easy to draw parallels between the story of Abraham and Isaac, and the father and the son in The Road, both stories contain the absurd.