Comparison Essay on The Road - The outsider, Light and Dark

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Compare and Contrast Essay

Light and Dark – The Outsider and The Road

Diana Gaita

Commentary Outline

Thesis Statement: 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.

Paragraph 1:

TS: Light and Dark is shown through absurdism, which is shown through imagery.

  1. The imagery used in The Outsider gives us a contrast between light and dark.
  2. Camus writes in such a way that makes the character impersonal and gives us his opinion about the real world.
  3. 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:

Paragraph 2:

        TS: 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
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Paragraph 3:

        TS: Light has different meanings within each book.

  1. In The Road the motif of light appears at the end of the novel suggesting a possible shade of faith.
  2. The author describes in the scene of the boy watching over his dying father a fading light, the light of a candle.
  3. 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 ...

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