What Are The Literary Devices In The Road By Cormac Mccarthy

Essay#1: The Road: Cormac McCarthy’s Penmanship

Cormac McCarthy declared to Oprah Winfrey his personal sentiments that he prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, and or a colon for setting off a list only, but "never a semicolon." He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird tiny marks." So indeed, Cormac McCarthy demonstrates an idiosyncratic composition demeanor in his marquee novels. He is an author that does not stick to convention when it comes to writing. McCarthy does not seem to enjoy using weird grammar points or symbols unless they are absolutely essential. McCarthy’s manner illustrates the novel’s occurrences

differently, thus conveying the hopeless world he has made up.

Dialogues are not fully set apart from each other. Instead they mix in with the prose of the story. McCarthy employs punctuation, spaces, and short verses of poetry to express the themes and to accentuate the main characters.

McCarthy is a minimalist author who prefers only to use periods and capitalization. He lets the words and or composition speak for itself. He detests semi-colons. The key literary devices employed to meet this end are flashbacks, repetition, and vibrant illustrations of Mother Earth. The bleak imagery he evokes aims to impress upon the reader the hard circumstances that the man and boy are enduring. In the book, the protagonists confront the identical themes in their dialogue. The constant themes are whether they will perish due to starvation, them supposedly being the “good guys”, and carrying the fire within themselves. These slogans or repeating phrases bring to light the steady themes of the end of life, anarchy, and low survivability to the fore. Continuing on, the different flashbacks are intermingled with the pictures of a deteriorating Earth inhabited by heartless people and of a flourishing Mother Earth, highlight the

extent of the man and boy’s situation. The flashbacks mess with the chronological order of the story. The tiring journey of the father and son are reflected in the flashbacks. Any sort of proper punctuation is notably scarce. The most obvious grammatical laws are not held in regard. The novel’s grammar tends well to the minor style of the book. The content is bogged down to the bare minimum. McCarthy seems to entertain the style, as he experiments with contractions. As an instance, on page two, he makes use of an apostrophe in “there’d” but leaves any chance of continuity of this in “had not”. The use of this literary device creates an ambiguous response in the reader, as the motives of the writer are questionable and clouded, akin to the location of the setting. McCarthy diverts from using quotation marks all together, essentially incorporating discourse with exposition. It might reflect the characters’ emotions in the book. The details are deemed to be of no importance and are most likely insignificant in the post-apocalyptic land.
McCarthy uses large spaces to separate paragraphs once in a while in his books.

The pauses can give readers a time to rest and or reflect on the story. The barren nature of the paragraphs reflects of losing hope in the ravaged land of ash. On The Road, the father and son just scavenge for food and water in order to survive. The spaces in the book may represent the luck they have constantly, even in the direst situations. The spaces are like an oasis in the

desert.
McCarthy lets the paragraphs flow freely and lets the readers generate a good reading pace. The paragraphs are long enough and are consistent in writing style. But sometimes McCarthy throws random poetic paragraphs for the reader to comprehend.
McCarthy’s use of such little grammar can lead to readers becoming lost in who is speaking in the story. The transitions are not clearly cut from one another. The poetry is necessary to make the father more human.
In conclusion, McCarthy uses little to no grammar because he can do so; he is arguably the best American writer to ever live. So he has the authority to write in whatever style he wants. I like his style as it makes his novels easier to read and delve into. The characterization of the father and son were both helped and hindered with his blatant style. The boy’s dialogue was choppy at points in the book, especially in the first chapter. The novel is sparse and simple like the post-apocalyptic world they now live in. The poetry allows the reader liberty to interpret the meaning behind the poetic phrases. The spaces make for a better and faster reading of the book. The themes and the character developments are reinforced by the writing style McCarthy has employed in the novel.