A Limited Palette
Cormac McCarthy writes with a limited palette in The Road, like a painter choosing a restricted range of colours. Certain adjectives crop up repeatedly, for instance, ‘gray’ and ‘ashen’. The dialogue often follows a similar pattern, ending with the father asking the boy if he’s ‘okay’ and the boy responding ‘okay.’ The sentence structures are also often highly repetitive, with simple and compound sentences being used rather than complex ones.
Examples of literary analyses in the text-
There is a powerfully poetic effect in the simplicity of the language. By avoiding rhetorical flourishes and elaborate language the writer makes a stronger impact.
Through this analysis, poetically the dark and dead atmosphere is described with a direct impact that provokes us to think of this post-apocalyptic world.
· “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray
each one than what had gone before”
“Barren, silent, godless”.
“The segments of the road down there among the dead
trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing
smoke.”
“The road was empty. Below the valley the still gray serpentine of
a river. Motionless and precise. Along a shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you
okay?”
“Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching
away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind
wire strung from the blackened light poles whining thinly in the wind”.
“The faint light was all about,quivering and
sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot.”
“In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d
watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with
the keels of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to
the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air. “
“Lumbering and creaking like a ship.”
“Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk.
Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He was lean, wiry,
rachitic.”
“There found nothing. All the stores were rifled
years ago, the glass mostly gone in the windows. Inside it was all but too dark to see.”
“All these things he saw and did not see. What is
coming? Footsteps in the leaves. No. Just the wind. Nothing. He sat up and
looked towards the house but he could see only darkness”.
“His dreams brightened. The vanished world
returned. Kin long dead washed up and cast fey sidewise looks up him. None
spoke. He thought of his life. So long ago.”
“Dark and black and trackless where it crossed the
open country”
“Cold. Desolate. Birdless.”
“Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put
back. Not to be made right again.”
Avoiding emotional language and keeping it simple makes the narrative all the more emotionally engaging.
This analysis draws us closer to the emotional state of the characters and although it is simplistic language in moments, we connect with the relationship the man and the boy hold and we too, cling onto it throughout the novel as it is the one stable thing.
“Tolling in the silence of the minutes of the earth
and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease.”
“He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure.
He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south”.
“Wrapped in blankets, watching the nameless dark.”
“The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late
world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried
forth and scattered forth and carried forth again”
“Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy
knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.”
“How many miles? Ten, twelve.”
“I just keep going. I knew this was coming. You
knew it was coming? Yeah. This or something like it. I always believed in it.”
“A man sat on a porch in his coveralls dead for
years. They went down the long dark wall of the mill, the windows bricked up.
The fine black soot raced along the street before them.”
“He measured the road with a piece of string and
looked at it and measured again, still a long way to the coast. He didn’t know
what they’d find when they got there.”
“Things abandoned long ago by pilgrim’s enroute to
their several and collective deaths.”
“There was no place for him to go.”
The limited palette makes the story more universal, a fable for all time, rather than pinning it down with lots of elaborate details describing specific places.
By avoiding elaborate details in moments within the novel, the repetitive techniques reflect a monotonous world. Time is merged together and rather than focusing on this, the reader perhaps focuses on the characters and their relationships.
“Tolling in the silence of the minutes of the earth
and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease.”
“He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure.
He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south”.
“Wrapped in blankets, watching the nameless dark.”
“The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late
world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried
forth and scattered forth and carried forth again”
“Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy
knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.”
“How many miles? Ten, twelve.”
“I just keep going. I knew this was coming. You
knew it was coming? Yeah. This or something like it. I always believed in it.”
“A man sat on a porch in his coveralls dead for
years. They went down the long dark wall of the mill, the windows bricked up.
The fine black soot raced along the street before them.”
“He measured the road with a piece of string and
looked at it and measured again, still a long way to the coast. He didn’t know
what they’d find when they got there.”
“Things abandoned long ago by pilgrim’s enroute to
their several and collective deaths.”
“There was no place for him to go.”
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