[Be warned that mild, non-plot-oriented spoilers follow in this post. It's largely a discussion of Cormac McCarthy's unique punctuation and prose style, including excerpts from the book.]
There are two literary conventions used in The Road which are, well, unconventional. They are:
- All the characters are nameless, including the two protagonists (referred to simply as "the man" and "the boy");
- Dialog between characters is not denoted by quotation marks.
Employed by a less talented writer, these would likely seem pretentious or just gimmicky. Instead, they work to immerse us in the surreal post-apocalyptic setting. When everything on earth is ash and dust, and civilization as we know it is completely gone, it feels appropriate that the characters who inhabit this hellish wasteland should do so in a way that feels less than fully substantial on the page. It's a useful cognitive abstraction that's appropriate to the elegiac tone of the book.
Beyond those two unconventional choices, I was struck from time to time by the sheer beauty of McCarthy's writing. I'm not very widely read in the giants of literature, but the terse sentences and stark, muscular imagery intermixed with nuggets of philosophy reminded me of
Hemingway. The following passages leapt out at me as especially vivid, provocative, or both:
Page 33:People sitting on the sidewalk at dawn half immolated and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others would come to help them. Within a year fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.
Page 54:No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.
Page 130:He walked out in the gray and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
Page 181:By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.
Page 196:Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.
Wow!
What do you think? Any thoughts on McCarthy's style of writing? Did the tricks with the (lack of) names and quotation marks work for you, or not? How about the actual sentiments expressed in these quotes?
