5. McCarthy's novel is a stark contrast to Kerouac's in terms of language. While Kerouac is lyrical, loud, and colorful, McCarthy's style is dark and

In Kerouac’s “On The Road”, the language is full and not filtered, and feels as if he leaves nothing out, just packing the book full of all information, useful or not. On the other hand, McCarthy gives the impression that he is meticulously sorting through every word, choosing each one carefully and giving you just enough information so that you’ll keep reading, but not enough that you’ll ever fully know what’s going on. For example, on page 4 McCarthy first introduces the fact that everyone wears masks with “He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face…” and again on page 14 with “The boy had found some crayons and painted his facemask with fangs…” these being only a couple of the many examples. Yet, by the end of the book (and correct me if I’m wrong) it is never clearly explained why they wear masks. This sort of thing is something I found typical of McCarthy, where he would continue to write about things that he would never actually explain, the best example being the entire core plot, because it is never explained why the world is like this and how they got where they are. I’m not saying that that is necessarily bad thing, because the fact that he is so non-descript about many things allows you to focus your attention to the most important part of the story; the relationship between the father and son. While I thought this idea of writing in such a pure way was good in theory, I do not like how it transferred into reality. I found that because this story lacked so many details, (not to say that McCarthy did not paint a very vivid picture) I felt as if I was being relentlessly beaten over the head with the exact same thing over and over again, which in turn gave me the ending feeling of having read something without a beginning, middle, or end. However, that could have actually been McCarthy’s choice, so as you’re reading you can feel what they are going through, with the constant reminder of how dark and cold it is, and how hard it is to find food, along with everything else. Although, if McCarthy was in fact going for that feeling, then I don’t think he should have made the reader so detached from the characters, by only referring to them as “The Man” and “The Boy” and choosing to write it in 3^rd person. On top of all of this, I often felt McCarthy was taking himself too seriously, by doing things such as using 3 similes on the very first page (“Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world”, “Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast”, and “sightless as the eggs of spiders” pg 1-2). In my opinion, the audience for this book could be anyone, because it’s written in 3^rd person the reader is not inside the mind of any particular sort of person, and the plot of the book is something affecting all of mankind, no one is left out. However, this book might be the most touching to those with children, especially fathers. In conclusion I thought this was a great idea for a book, and McCarthy has a very good imagination and a filtered, meticulous writing style that is not my taste, but that is certainly not bad.