LITERATURE: The Road – Language Structure

Here then, is the antithesis of beauty in the beauty of words:

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.  Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.  (p. 152)

These two sentences are typical McCarthy.  They also follow a sentence that has been often quoted in reviews; one which reveals a bit more of the state of the world.  But I am looking at words here.  Words that are carefully chosen and strung together to give more than their definitive meaning to the story.  The long sentence structure differs from the majority of the aforegoing text.  This seems to bring a mood of hopelessness as the landscape takes on the structure of a never-ending plane.

It’s all the same, McCarthy is telling us; it won’t get better.  The coastline is just as ravaged as the interior land.

McCarthy has a way of keeping things from us that he doesn’t think we need to know, that may shift focus away from the moment.  Then again, he has a tremendously subtle way of saying something that we might have missed if we’re unused to him:

The boy nodded.  He sat looking at the map.  The man watched him.  He thought he knew what that was about.  He’ pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town where he lived.  Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory.  Themselves among others, everything in its place.  Justified in the world.  Come on, he said.  We should go. (p. 153)

The difference defined:  stability, the known, the safety of home versus the movement of We should go.