Ethics and Survival in Cormac MCcarthy’s The Road (2006) and Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016): A Comparative Study
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Date
2022
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Mouloud Mammeri University OF Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
This work addresses the ethical issues in Cormac MCcarthy’s The Road (2006) and Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016), associated with the theme of survival in the context of the apocalypse. The main focus of this dissertation is to draw parallels and direct comparison between MCcarthy’s and Sang-ho’s representations of the apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic genre, while considering survival as a fundamental element when studying ethics in both The Road and Train to Busan. This study adopts Verharen’s Survival Ethics Theory: To Be Good Is First to Be, as it accompanies the major part of the analysis. Other theories derived from Survival Ethics are used to conduct this research; namely Charles Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest, Greg Garrett’s The Ethics of the Zombie Apocalypse and Stefan Klein’s Survival of the Nicest. The one important finding in this work consists in the fact that all the characters in the two works have one ethical responsibility that is: surviving while maintaining their morality, because maintaining their morality allows them to survive as a species. Thus, based upon these theories and the comparative analysis of the two works, this dissertation concludes that survival cannot be dissociated from the study of ethics in the two works, and vice versa, since both of them are interrelated.
Description
52p. ; 30cm.(+CD-Rom)
Keywords
MCcarthy, Yeon sang-ho, The Road, Train to Busan, Survival, Ethics
Citation
General and Comparative Literature