By not including punctuation and other grammatical structures, Cormac McCarthy creates a narrative that is starkly bare, stripped to nothingness like the novel’s setting. By choosing this style for his writing, McCarthy is employing an additional vehicle, besides the content he presents, by which to communicate to the reader the emptiness of the world after the cataclysmic event that for all intents and purposes destroyed it.
It is a testimony to the authors’ tremendous talent that, despite his use of the bare minimum in writing his story, he is able to convey the deep love that exists between the two main characters. Through the use of the simple, unembellished statements and questions that make up their interaction and conversation, McCarthy gives the reader a clear sense of the undying tenderness and devotion that lives and grows between father and son in the face of impossible odds.
McCarthy writes mostly from the point of view of the father. However, towards the end when the father is dying, McCarthy writes passages through the boy’s eyes. Once the father dies, the book’s perspective switches to his son. Consequently, the point of view is unreliable and telling the majority of the story through the father’s point of view makes their situation, perhaps, bleaker than it may actually be.
The boy is actually quite a positive and emotional person, but with the focus on the father, the boy comes across as overly sensitive and unhelpful to the their struggle for survival. In comparison, the father initially comes across as the strong, self-sacrificing figure, battling against the elements. When the father dies, the readers’ understanding of the novel and the father’s character changes.
See Exercise 1 for expansion on this.
Critics writing on Cormac McCarthy often note the striking paucity of revelations of interior thought in his novels. James Bowers, for instance, claims that few modern writers reject “the Joycean tradition of interiority” as comprehensively as does McCarthy, while Jay Ellis notes “the absence of regular psychologizing” (Bowers 14, Ellis 5). These critics associate the moral bleakness and prevailing mood of despair in the novels with a stylistic absence of revelations of characters’ thoughts, a style consistent with many American naturalist writers.
Although McCarthy limits revelations of interior thought, however, he does not eliminate them entirely. The distant, omniscient third-person narrative style typical of McCarthy’s works at times shifts into the limited third person voice, revealing the perspective of a particular character. At times, third-person narration even moves into first-person narration. This striking shift into the close third or first-person point of view most often reveals the thoughts of characters who exhibit moral awareness and ethical behavior. When the narrative shifts to the perspective of immoral characters, that shift draws attention to that immoral character’s humanity, simulating an empathetic response that encourages readers to recognize their shared humanity with even the most despicable representatives of the human race. Shifts in point of view are thus consistently associated with morality, revealing characters’ yearning for community, valuation of life, or commitment to justice and compassion.
To date, no one has systematically explored narrative perspective and its connection to morality in McCarthy’s novels. The worldview of McCarthy’s novels is notoriously difficult to identify, since his novels and plays, when placed in conversation with each other, dialogically pit arguments for the self-destructive nature of humankind against arguments for a rather mystical divine providence.
Lydia R Cooper https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/baylor-ir/handle/2104/5228
The Road –
McCarthy’s most recently published novel, and quite possibly his last ever, The Road shares the style of his late phase, but in many ways it is a singular work. Spatially, we are back in the Appalachia of McCarthy’s first four novels, but temporally we are someplace we have not yet been: terra incognita, the imaginary future.
The Road finds McCarthy’s language at its most minimalist; yet out of this very spare language McCarthy creates one of his most deeply felt characters, the closest we have ever been to a novel-length first-person narrator. He frequently places us into the father’s head indirectly. (“He knew that he was placing hopes where he’d no reason to. He hoped it would be brighter where for all he’d knew the world grew darker daily. He’d once found a light meter in a camera store that he thought . . .”) In terms of morality, the almost complete state of nature McCarthy imagines post-apocalypse and the unrequited chain of horrors entailed by it (not seen since Blood Meridian) mark this book as far more bleak and morally vacant than anything in McCarthy’s late phase—even No Country for Old Men’s anti-heroes and psychopaths still had something to live for (money, power, material accumulation) beyond pure survival.
The Road is, in many ways, a logical endpoint of his career, and one imagines that were McCarthy to publish another novel he would have to leap into entirely new territory. For all his career McCarthy has followed characters choosing to leave civilization, but in The Road McCarthy envisions the opposite: a world in which civilization leaves his characters. For once McCarthy’s protagonist is not a drifter. Rather, he is a man with a wife and a young boy, and he probably would still be but for the apocalypse. In an undefined worldwide catastrophe (I take it to be an asteroid impact), civilization is destroyed, leaving those still living to face a de facto life permanently alienated from civilized life. The road becomes an end in itself. McCarthy’s most alienated characters have always had some home to return to (even Lester Ballard could return to his asylum), but in The Road home ceases to exist. Home is the road.
The Road is a very morally ambiguous book. What is quite clear is that, a) many of the survivors have completely eschewed any morality of any sort, and b) the father and the boy whose story we follow do believe in some kind of morality, what they often refer to as “carrying the fire.” What makes this so morally ambiguous is that it’s not at all clear that either father or son actually believes that there’s anything to preserve or that their actions in such a world are more than futile. The idea of “carrying the fire” may just be purely functional, just another trick for getting themselves to walk a few more miles down the road instead of surrendering into death. In that case it’s hardly a morality, which should be an expression of higher ideals, although in its functionality and general derivativeness it does resemble the beliefs of McCarthy’s wanderer-cowboys in his Western novels.
It is notable that whether or not the father and son believe their choices ultimately will have any consequence, they do occasionally reach limits that they will not transgress. Cannibalism—widely practiced in McCarthy’s bleak future—is one such limit. The boy and the father also argue fiercely over whether they should help fellow travelers. The weight that McCarthy places on these decisions—even though the world is free from any greater power (even God, it seems) to enforce norms of behavior—seems consistent with his career-long belief that certain decisions can prefigure one’s future regardless of time or place, something that began with Sylder’s fateful murder of a hitchhiker and ran all the way up through Chigurh’s pseudo-religious code of action.
In The Road, McCarthy has finally gotten his late style settled into a workable whole. Despite the spare prose, it is a book primarily concerned with imagining its world, but it is also a somewhat allegorical work; instead of focusing on fate and free will, McCarthy strikes a more religious stance, with overtones that this father and son are the Father and Son. At one point the boy moves “with light all about him.” On the eve of the father’s death, the son says:
You said you wouldnt ever leave me.
I know. I’m sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.
Will I hear you?
Yes, You will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you’ll hear me. You have to practice. Just don’t give up. Okay?
What makes The Road a more artistically pleasing work than the novels after Blood Meridian is that McCarthy has returned to his love of imagining how people get on with their lives from day to day. The father and boy are two of his most inventive characters yet, and McCarthy seems to relish the challenge of imagining survival in a wholly fictive time and place. When McCarthy does strive for something beyond the text, his discussion is carefully folded into the surrounding action: gone are the lengthy monologues that come up from nowhere or the odd little scenes that are pieced in for no other reason than to make a philosophical point. 10
The style is almost as spare as in No Country, but because we have a better sense of the son and father as characters, it is easier to imagine their movements and manner of speaking. This allows The Road to be a much more ironic work than anything after Suttree (itself a monumentally skewed piece of writing), but it is also a much more understated work than Suttree; the irony here requires a more sensitive ear, and it is thus open to greater interpretation. The Road is also richer than other late McCarthy because instead of only seeing their life insofar as it relates to murder, cleaning wounds, or horsemanship, in The Road McCarthy imagines a wide range of human behavior, again harkening back to his work before Blood Meridian. In this last book McCarthy has grafted some of the better elements of his early and late styles and finally gotten the late style right.
Although it has been reported that McCarthy was at work on several manuscripts concurrently with No Country for Old Men, and was relatively unconcerned as to which order they were published in, it is hard to imagine McCarthy publishing another novel in his late manner after The Road. The book ends with the clear implication that this is the end of humanity: on the backs of trout are “maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not made right again.” Finding a map of the world on the back of a trout is consistent with imagery in McCarthy’s other books, where portents of humanity and its future are glimpsed in natural phenomenon. The “maps and mazes” too are reminiscent of past McCarthy; for instance, the tangled paths of John Grady’s and Billy’s lives, which can only be seen whole and comprehended in retrospect. The difference is that The Road implies that this map is not of just one man’s life but of the entire human race. Even the elegiac tone is consistent with his Southwestern works, but never have the stakes been so high as to accord that “not made right again” such finality. This is the perhaps inevitable conclusion of McCarthy’s late-stage theme that war is the one defining feature of humanity. 11 This would further point to The Road as the logical terminus of McCarthy’s work, for where else would he go with this theme that has sat at the core of his last six novels? Writer Quarterly Conversations.
Sometimes I think McCarthy’s third-person narrator is doing a version of the chorus from Child of God, watching and chatting with us, but not pretending to comprehend or know the whole story. Like the “or some other bird” in Outer Dark. He could also be a disingenuous narrator.
Or maybe that “uncertainty principle” in the narrator is just another symptom of the postmodern in McCarthy, or rather, that at least one of McCarthy’s feet is the postmodern camp, and that there is no knowledge since the narrator is “at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.”I like the line of thought centering on uncertainty. Nietzsche famously said “We are strangers to ourselves.”
The Road is a frightening, profound tale that drags us into places we don’t want to go, forces us to think about questions we don’t want to ask.
Ron Charles The Washington Post.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey that boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains but in which the father and his son each the other’s world entire are sustained by love awesome in the totality of its vision it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of ultimate destructiveness desperate tenacity and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. However, at the outset, my question would be where is the mother? Is the novel an indictment of contemporary American culture, he is making the child a supreme value above all others in the tradition of Victorianism. The environment is ” like the onset of some glaucoma dimming away the world”. The simile introduces the theme of losing sight and is followed by loss of light. He “looked toward the east for any light but there was none”. This is a post- Apocalyptic adventure story that becomes an allegory of human life in a post-modernist age of spiritual death.
The characters are nameless because names do not matter anymore and this makes them archetypal representatives of the human race. The narration is full of sentence fragments which reminds me of Postmodern fiction. The style is bare like the landscape, “barren, silent, godless” The narrator is silent as to what disaster has occurred which generates a mystery. We are limited to what the characters know, much of which is withheld. Narrative simplicity intensifies emotional impact, as when the man embraces the boy, and it makes the archetypal symbolism stand out clearly – light, dark, warm, cold, road, fire. The landscape ahead is “godless” before humanity and belief in gods or God. He is on a divine mission to save humanity represented by the child. They are following a road south to escape the winter cold. “There’d be no surviving another winter here” shows the disaster must have occurred several years ago. The grocery cart reminds me of homeless people and the story itself reminds me of some of the images found in the textbook Place Room seven, “When faith moves mountains ” with people surrounding the barren desolate landscape, the ruined art gallery reminiscent of how the world might look after a disaster. The simple phrase” on the road” reminds me of American literature from Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac and is grimly ironic. When” he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father’s house in that long ago” his nostalgia is for all he has lost forever; which reminds me of the poem which we read called Fernhill (Dylan Thomas) a nostalgia for the past.
The scale of the disaster is implied by “The ashes of the late world” and by the reduction of a city without lights to a “grey shape that vanished in the night’s onset like an apparition” replaced by their” little lamp”. All around them “There was nothing.” They, however, mean everything to each other:” If you died I would want to die too”. His constant coughing reminds one that he is dying and he’s trying to complete his mission before he dies. The shortness of the speeches, the simple sentences remind one of the bleak misery and near despair when they pass through the dead city, a corpse in the doorway is “dried to leather” again indicates that the disaster happened years ago. This raises the question how long has the man been a single parent, how long have they been on the road, why did they take to the road, is there something at the end of the road, are they hoping to find something at the end of the road. The boy catches a grey snowflake in his hand “and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom.” There are cannibals, people are isolated, separated from humanity, the world has regressed from civilisation to barbarism. “He thought the blood cults must have all consumed one another. No one traveled this road. No road agents, no marauders” On this road there still hope. They build a fire and he “sat working on the wheel ” .This evokes the evolution of the human race, which must now be repeated if possible-” reinventing the wheel of civilisation“. “The boy sat watching everything”. The relationship of the dying man to a boy who represents the younger generation reminds me of the relationship of the old man and boy reminds me of Hemingway’s book The Old Man and the Sea. The younger generation riding on the shoulders of the older.
I found the book very bleak if readable, but I couldn’t relate to the characters they seemed distant not rounded. I preferred to know my characters and prefer to read a more upbeat book. The effect the book had was of profound sadness and it was for me very American and reminded me in some ways of Mad Max films. I have seen the film The Road which may have influenced how I felt about reading the book, as I found the film pretty awful both from an acting point of view and from the story point of view. The book moves a lot more smoothly and it tells the tale much more poignantly but at the same time at the end of it I feel there was something missing. It was well told, but in some ways, it did read like a script as though you were to fill in all the gaps, it left me unfulfilled. A number of Science Fiction stories have a similar feel – The Time Machine HG Wells, Hard Sun currently on TV a dark future for humanity. Perhaps that was the author’s intention that I had to use my imagination to fill in the parts that he left out and to decide if we have a future!
CREATIVE ARTS TODAY 