Arguing for a Statement

“The death of everything living – plants, trees, creatures, and most other human beings- is evoked through the bleakness and ‘deadness’ of the language” – 30 minutes

McCarthy’s simplistic language is compensated by his use of imagery and complex metaphors ‘Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?’- the reader is regularly left to debate the meaning behind specific quotes, here for example McCarthy uses imagery to reflect humanity, and their unnecessary disappointment over something which was never to be, rather than bluntly stating this the complex description highlights the ‘living in a dead world’ reality through the novel, and could reflect trying to create interest and ‘excitement’ in a dead world.

When describing the corpses McCarthy is again blunt, highlighting the bleak reality, ‘people sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides.’  Personifying the dead, and suggesting they were suicides further reinforces the frequent death of all things. The concept of time following this quote represents the unity of the remaining living eventually separating and resorting to death as a better option ‘within a year…by day the dead impaled on spikes along the road’. The frequent time change and yet slow monosyllabic language/pace reflects their lives passing by, wasted, whilst their never-ending journey along the road continues.

Dialogue and exposition between characters continues a similar theme of ‘the living in a dead world’ conversations between all characters is bleak, emotionless and non-naturalistic, highlighting the distance in all relationships. For example, the mother- when leaving- expresses no emotion, although this could be interpreted to make it easier for the father (evoking emotion on the reader) ‘you remember what you want to forget and forget what you want to remember’, her dis-concern contrasts the father’s pleading for her to stay ‘I don’t care. I don’t care if you cry. It doesn’t mean anything to me’. McCarthy creates a highly clichéd image of the women, and a traditional domestic scene, an attempt to create normality, as he continues religious themes also, ‘weaker sex’, ‘suicide being a sin’ etc.

The ‘dead’ language reflects the death of all surrounding the characters, McCarthy perhaps uses short separate sentences to isolate information, and reflect the father and son being entirely alone as; ‘ On this road are no God spoke men. They are gone and I am left.’  Their journey, and the mother is summarised in the first paragraph ‘some cold glaucoma dimming away the world’ the mother has physically lost her eyesight as a result of this world, and all the remaining living are slowly dying, an idea reflected through the deeper darkness we experience further into the novel, resulting in the father breaking his one promise- not to leave the boy- and following the corpses and his wife’s example to death.