The Road by Cormac Mccarthy

Essay on the ways in which the ‘Aspects of Narrative’ help to convey meaning and reinforce McCarthy’s artistic ambition in the first 69 pages of The Road. In the post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy explores the perseverance of a man and his son to survive in an obliterated, destructed world. The storyline reveals the state of anarchy that society has become, and how the slow but guaranteed demise of the human race has pushed the last remaining people to resort to surviving by any means necessary, for example, all moral and ethical codes are forgotten, as murder and cannibalism are exercised.

From the first page of The Road, the distinct writing style of The Road is seen to fit the world that he is describing. He sparsely uses punctuation, which creates the illusion that the rules and conventions of writing do not matter in this post-apocalyptic world; it creates a sense of disorder as the importance of the ‘normal’ means nothing anymore. McCarthy doesn’t use apostrophes in his writing; ‘dont’ is the word he uses in place of ‘don’t.’ This relates to the theme of disorder as McCarthy is revealing to the reader that it is such a ‘barren, silent, godless’ world there is no hope for the previous code returning anytime soon. McCarthy’s lack of punctuation, including commas, gives his sentences a running feel: ‘He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds.’ The lack of commas reflects the ‘barren’ land as there is a desolate mood to the sentences. This also reveals that McCarthy wants the character of the man to be seen as a man who is solely focused on looking after and caring for his son and information he would previously have had a care for are not important anymore.

The opening of The Road quickly