Paragraph 3:
TS: Light has different meanings within each book.
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In The Road the motif of light appears at the end of the novel suggesting a possible shade of faith.
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The author describes in the scene of the boy watching over his dying father a fading light, the light of a candle.
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in The Outsider light is used in order to emphasize the main character’s revelation of his deed. Here light is used as justice and also as the passing of Meursault into the light.
Conclusion:
TS:Both authors create strong images by using the themes of light and dark, in their own unique way. As the light is overwhelming, but not necessarily in a good manner, in The Outsider, the dark is overwhelming and pressing in The Road. The sequence of light and dark comes natural in both novels, dark after light in The Outsider and light after dark in The Road. While Meursault faces the darkness of his cell after his kills the Arab in a scene flooded with sunlight, as a consequence of his actions, the father and son keep the flame of everything that is human alive in a hellish world, as a reason to remain faithful. Albert Camus and Cormac McCarthy have different ways of describing the two themes, but the result is the same: a strong impact on the reader though their metaphoric tales.
Judging from the point of view of the concepts of light and dark The Outsider by Albert Camus and Cormac McCarthy’s Road are novels that seem to evolve in different directions: the character in The Outsider goes from light to darkness – the light is overwhelming in the first part of the novel and the dark dominates the second part after he commits murder, while the father and son in The Road go from darkness to light in their journey from a desolate unspecified location to a better and more inviting place and future.
Albert Camus is an absurdist and he uses the concept of light and dark in The Outsider in order to emphasize his true feelings about the human existence while McCarthy’s work is all about the theme of survival and the imagery of the novel is brutal and significant for the post apocalyptical scenario. Even though Camus is an absurdist the protagonist in our book is unaware of absurdity in the human life. Camus writes in such a way that makes the character impersonal and gives us his opinion about the real world. The imagery used in The Outsider gives us a contrast between light and dark. This is created by using different groups of words that flourish with a signification with the meaning of light and dark. For example: flooded with sunlight is an image that shows a contrast of light and dark, flooded can be taken as a dark word and sunlight as a word of light. These two extremes put together give an aspect of absurdism. Through this image Camus gives us the impression that the life as we know it can only be good or bad or we can say that every single life has sunlight in it, and some can be flooded with it. We can see this idea in many of his sentences like: burst open in the sun, the glare from the sky was unbearable. The author also used dark imagery in contrast to the light: blood pounding, blood red earth, big tears of frustration and exhaustion so as to accentuate the darkness in the character’s life. From the very beginning the author of The Road creates a strong image by repeating words that suggest darkness, introducing to the reader a world where people and places names are nameless and the darkness is a state of being: in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night, Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. By mentioning the concept of light he creates a contrast, which outlines the depth of darkness, (he) looked toward the east for any light but there was none.
Camus used diction with the motif of light and dark in order to put an emphasis on absurdism. He used words like: glowing, sunlight, shiny, white, shimmering to draw attention to the idea of light and the idea that the absurd is created not by the universe and the human mind is separately but rather by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously. On the other hand, McCarthy used the light as it is seldom present and is a symbol of hope in the dark layout, where the cannibals are described as creatures of the night. In contrast, the main characters are seen as the bearers of the light and the human spirit in its essence, which gives meaning to the grim world they live in. Even the snow, which is usually a symbol of light and purity, is grey, while everything else is covered in ash.
In The Road the motif of light appears at the end of the novel suggesting a possible shade of faith. The author describes in the scene of the boy watching over his dying father a fading light, the light of a candle. The father’s struggle for survival is not in vain and the boy meets one of the good guys and his family as he continues the journey. However in The Outsider light is used in order to emphasize the main character’s revelation of his deed. Here light is used as justice and also as the passing of Meursault into the light.
Both authors create strong images by using the themes of light and dark, in their own unique way. As the light is overwhelming, but not necessarily in a good manner, in The Outsider, the dark is overwhelming and pressing in The Road. The sequence of light and dark comes natural in both novels, dark after light in The Outsider and light after dark in The Road. While Meursault faces the darkness of his cell after his kills the Arab in a scene flooded with sunlight, as a consequence of his actions, the father and son keep the flame of everything that is human alive in a hellish world, as a reason to remain faithful. Albert Camus and Cormac McCarthy have different ways of describing the two themes, but the result is the same: a strong impact on the reader though their metaphoric tales.