The Road - Post 1, Question 5

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?

In the first couple of pages of The Road, I found myself getting frustrated with McCarthy's tightly packed similes and fragmented, descriptive sentences. That, combined with the lack of punctuation in certain contractions or quotations immediately set off my Excruciatingly Precious Radar. But, once I got into the rhythm of his writing, the prose sounded less forced, and I really began to love how he could twist figurative language to an extent as to render something as benign and uninteresting as old apricots as "long dried wrinkled effigies of themselves" (22). or the wisps of cold breath as "faint plumes" (80). The former probably marked the turning point in my opinion of The Road. Partially because it reminds me of this song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9w0fobEgFE , partially because the idea of turning food into "a crude representation of someone disliked, used for purposes of ridicule," as Merriam-Webster puts it, so sadistically mocks their quest for survival in a way that is communicated to the reader with just one word. And that's pretty cool and stuff.

Often when I come across such excess in literature it can become dry and I notice myself glazing past the contrived metaphors and similes to something more interesting. In contrast, I've actually slowed the pace of my reading a lot in this novel just so as to make sense of all the symbols McCarthy crams into his writing. One passage that took me a solid five minutes to absorb was the final paragraph on page 15;

"The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must."

To start, McCarthy's syntax rings so true, the reader can't help but feel the isolation of the blackness; of the 'autistic night.' His style lends the reader the ability to experience the redundancy, desperation, and almost awkwardness of their post-apocalyptic world. But what's more, is that truly in such a situation, one would begin to weigh some of the grander, overarching questions of life, as the Man and Boy both do. The reader watches them ponder questions of life versus death, of God, and of maintaining some sense of humanity in a world that's barely human. What I've found interesting about McCarthy's writing is that, beyond these big concepts, the language alone leads one to ask these questions of themself. For me, that was evidenced by that last sentence; "Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must." I've thought about it for hours (literally, I started writing this post at 2:30), and I'm still not sure I fully grasp the extent of its meaning, at least not enough to expound upon it. Some of the language is so potent it goes beyond explanation. And like the fundamental questions the characters face, it doesn't really have to be. To me, that's one of the marks of really powerful literature. I hope that made sense.