Question 5. Post 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 sparse. How does McCarthy's style lend to the story itself? Cite text for support. Who is his audience? How can you tell?

McCarthy’s story is about purpose. Bleakness functions to denote this. Typically, when writing, the author tries his/her best to set up handholds for the reader, setting up a space for the mind to settle and branch out into. McCarthy doesn’t do this, he wants you to feel uncomfortable, to parallel his characters’ experience from suffering to understanding. Normal details (a plastic deer in a lawn, haircuts, bicycle pumps, and highways) are skewered to fit the story, not the reader. The book is completely physical, even though in essence it’s entirely metaphysical. Both books are about finding the truth and making the best life possible for yourself, but one is restless and crams his words together and is always straining for something to give him a better time, he speeds by without using any gas---normal rules don’t apply to him. He is all about fulfillment through any means. The man in The Road has no long term goals beyond survival without compensating his morals. His audience will not mind this one big parable, in which he has stripped a story to the bones and papered with lessons and morals. These readers will be carried on the rising and falling of the forces of good and evil, not action in a plot. They are philosophical readers who want to analyze and think about the effects of god. This is obvious because McCarthy explains nothing for you, there is no exposition or epiphany or conclusion because there is no plot besides what you read into it for yourself, it’s a survival story about sacrifice and slow endurance, not fast plunges and adrenaline quests. You can’t read this passively, the story and language won’t bear you along by themselves. This is not a book for people who thrive in the new and specificity, but for people who won’t be embarrassed about talking about good old good versus evil and the significance of light and shadows and god and the meaning of life---none of these can be avoided here, and they are the only things that are openly discussed. For example: "He'd stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle." (p.273) And for me, even though this book seems to require so much more effort and interpretation, I don't think it does, really. It's almost like McCarthy hands all these pieces of wisdom to you on a silver platter, there's no real panning around---every sentence is a drama and each theme that crops up is the expected, black and white and not a huge amount of room for argument (like about what they could be and come to represent) beyond whether you like his style or not. And I'm sure I didn't really say these things exactly the way I meant to say them, but it's for these reasons that I prefer On the Road so much more.