LITERATURE: Loodbay Eridianmay

An unusual aspect of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and one that is noticed immediately is the lack of proper punctuation–commas, quotation marks, and semi-colons are all missing or sparsely used. Once you get used to it, you find that it is in fact the writer’s tool in style. What it accomplishes is more evident as one penetrates deeper into the story. Together with longer sentence structure, McCarthy uses it to pace the plot with action sequences that increase in horror and the reader finds himself reading these sequences more quickly to stop at a period and feel a sudden shock at what just happened. “But the judge was like a cat and he sidestepped the man and seized his arm and broke it and picked the man up by his head. He put him against the wall and smiled at him but the man had begun to bleed from the ears and the blood was running down between the judge’s fingers and over his hands and when the judge turned him loose there was something wrong with his head and he slid to the floor and did not get up.” Beautifully done.