Human Nature in The Road and The Assault

Human Nature in The Road and The Assault

    What is human nature, and how do these two stories manage to interpret the dark and controversial topic? When a child is born, his or her brain is created in a way that adjusts to their surroundings and as they grow they start to develop and absorb the information that is given to them, whether it’s through school, social interaction, or communicating with family. Family plays a big role in human nature, because the role of the parents, whom the children look up to for moral support, are the people who are always around them, telling them what to do, how to act, and what to believe in. How the parents raise the child will determine how the child will think in the future. This belief is known to many as the absorbent mind, due to the fact the the mind of a child is so vulnerable to their surroundings it adsorbs everything like a sponge. This philosophy supports the idea of John locke who believed that the human mind is a “Tabula Rasa”. Which is a Latin phrase meaning “blank slate”. What he means by this is from the very moment a person is born, they have no knowledge, no experience, and are utterly clueless. They are neither empathetic or selfish, but they are blank slates. The way they evolve as adults, depends entirely on how they are raised.

            

               In the road the boy was brought into the post-apocalyptic world during birth, he has no clue of how life was before. All he ever knew was the road. For Anton Steenwijk however, his adolescence mostly took place during World war 2. Although he did have a childhood, everything was forgotten.“Everything else is postscript” Anton says, revealing that the past is gone, and the only memory he has left he has left is the memory of the assault. It is this night that will help develop his character as the book reaches it’s conclusion.Both of these stories shed light to more than one theme, but the most relevant one is human nature. How far a human would go once they lose all hope, and how humans cope with situations that they can’t get passed. The stories also tackle themes such as hope, fear, memory, and loss.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a relationship between a father and his son who live in a post-apocalyptic world. The story is based on the future, although it is never revealed why the world became the way it is, it does give evidence that the story takes place after the rapture in the end of times, or after a nuclear attack that destroyed their world. Spirituality plays a big part in The Road. The story occasionally brings up references from the bible, and because of the man’s relationship with the boy is so strong, the boy resembles his hope, redemption, and innocence. Through his point of view, the boy is the man’s only living proof that God is in fact real. He believes that looking after the boy is his only purpose of living, and that he was assigned from God to protect him and to provide him with wisdom.  His determination to keep his son alive is proven when he shoots a Road Agent in the head once he attempts to kill him. "My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?”

The story also provides themes of hope and innocence. The symbolic figure which is used to describe hope is the fire which is inside of all of us. The fire also resembles the determination humans have to keep on going and to remain good. Cormac McCarthy claims that there is only two types of people: “The good guys” or “The bad guys” in the world, of The Road. The bad guys, (The road agents, who are often seen in groups of men) have lost their fire, and instead of having hope and determination, they now resort to cannibalism, violence, and brutality to survive. Revealing that their fire is no longer with them. Mccarthy goes into very descriptive and graphic detail to explain how the people living in the new world have become. For example, in one of the scenes the man and boy witness a pregnant woman walking in the road, the next morning they see that they have cooked the body of her newborn infant. “a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.” In a nutshell, the story talks a lot about the significance between the concepts of good and evil. Teaching the reader that the path of good and evil remains up to them and is entirely optional. Most of the people who live in the new world have chosen the dark path, which to them is a perfectly acceptable thing to do, but their are very few people who choose the good side. The story talks about how the boy and the man manage to remain hopeful, and make the best out if a situation that not every body would be capable of handling.

Even though the story of the man and the boy remains clear, the story of the road agents, their victims, and all the unknown characters around them remain a mystery. There are no bad characters, their is no antagonist, and their is no “bad guy”, everyone has the same motive and that is to survive. The road agents may not be doing the right, they may even accept that they are not doing the right thing, but to them their actions are acceptable, because they are simply trying to survive. even though it is possible that the road agents were good people in their life before the new world, their backgrounds are never revealed.  

    The Assault by Harry Mulisch tells the story of a boy named Anton Steenwijk, who during the “Hunger Winter” of  1944-1945 (Last days of World War 2) in a town called Haarlem, witnessed an assassination. After a German officer gets shot to death by the resistance, Anton’s family spots their neighbours (The Korteweg’s) take the officer's body and place it in front of their front porch. Anton’s brother Peter, who attempts to move the corpse is spotted by other German officers who come across the crime scene. This later leads to Anton witnessing his house being caught up in flames after being taken away  from his family by the police. After being told that his family was assassinated the night after the assault, the traumatizing night haunts Anton for the entirety of his life. Anton who tries to avoid and forget about the night of the assault, finds the past coming back to him. Reminding him of the eventful night. The story which is a mystery within itself, talks about facing loss, trauma, and reality.

We all have our different ways of coping, this book proves enough of that. The three events that happened in the night of the assault. “Besides, whoever keeps the future in front of him and the past at his back is doing something else that's hard to imagine. For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory.” Antons house --Carefree-- was burned down. He was taken to a police station where he spent the night in a dark cell with woman, after waking he found blood smears on his face which belonged to her, once he was sent to Amsterdam he witnessed the murder of another officer who was in charge of sending him to Amsterdam with his uncle. Once the story progresses you begin to find out that after everything that happened (Even though he was haunted by the assault) Anton was more preoccupied over the woman in the prison cell.

There are five different stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. people all have their different way of coping, but for Anton he handled it strangely. Although he did accept the death of his family, he didn’t accept the night of the assault, which he put behind him and tried to forget about. This story proves that the past will always come back to you, and you must always face the problem instead of avoid it. Although, Antons decision to avoid the problem was a decision most people choose after going through a traumatic experience, this story proves that it takes people time to cope and deal with the problem. For Anton it took him half of his life to get over, and to finally discover the whole truth. For others coping with a traumatic situation can take longer compared to Anton.

    One of the main themes the assault gave to the reader is that there is more than one side to every story in the night the assault everything intertwined. All of the important characters were where they needed to be that night, and if one thing had gone differently the assault would have never happened. It was all a big domino effect, a domino effect which would affect and help form Anton’s character as he evolves into a grown man. This story proves that any event change and affect how a child thinks. Fake Ploeg Jr. can be used as an example, the event of his father being assassinated, caused his whole life to turn upside down. Although it wasn’t he who witnessed his death, or had to deal with the trauma of the assault, he still had to deal with a lot more troubles growing up than Anton did, and as a result, the one person he ended up accusing for his father's death was “the communists”. Anton in the other hand blamed the fascists for what happened to his family. “Your father was killed by the Communists with premeditation because they decided that it was essential, but my family was senselessly slaughtered by Fascists, of whom your father was one.” By the end of the story we don’t just realize the truth of that night, but we also know that Anton wasn’t the only person who suffered. Everybody suffered, Karin Korteweg who had to deal with her father's suicide, Takes who had to deal with the death of Truus, Fake who had to deal with his father's assassination, and especially the Beumers who had to deal with the uncertainty of that night.

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Caroline. "Harry Mulisch: The Assault – De Aanslag (1982)." Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat. N.p., 21 June 2012. Web. 17 May 2017.