Contractions in Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: contractionsCormac McCarthy The Road Notes 1. An extensive body of criticism focuses on the sparse style, on what Donoghue calls the “neuter austerity” (267), characteristic of much of McCarthy's prose: Bell refers to the “elliptical narrative” and the “condensed eloquence” (Achievement 7, 116) of McCarthy's fiction; Guinn discusses its “emphatic terseness” (573); Ellis mentions McCarthy's use of “severely elided narration” (40), a “terse prose style” (228), and “simplicity of expression” (310); and Frye claims McCarthy's “overall style is minimalist and reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway” (171). Some of the earliest responses to The Road, specifically, focused on this feature, with one New York Times reviewer, Kennedy, referring to its “terse dialogue and spartan narrative,” and another, Maslin, using the phrase “stripped-down.” Later, Cant refers to McCarthy's “sparse descriptions” (267) of the blighted landscape; Kunsa calls the style of The Road “pared down, elemental” (58); and Lincoln discusses the novel's “postapocalyptic grammar” (165) and “desolate lyricism” (166). 2. See Bell, for example, who published seminal discussions of McCarthy's nihilism in both an article (1983) and a subsequent book-length study (1988). 3. There has been much commentary on the range and variety of McCarthy's prose style, the way he alternates between stripped-down and effusive or ornate writing. Bingham discusses this tendency in Blood Meridian; Jarrett summarizes McCarthy's entire “repertoire of stylistic registers” (121); Spencer calls McCarthy “a minimalist in punctuation, a maximalist in diction” (55); Kreml outlines this stylistic feature in All the Pretty Horses; Morgan calls attention to “the movement from an almost Baroque style, to a crisp, imagist style” (19) in Child of God; and Holloway illustrates how the “static negation” (47) of McCarthy's prose competes with its “density and … rhetorical complexity” (47). While The Road appears sparse, I argue for a submerged dialectic. 4. McCarthy follows a similar typographical pattern in other novels; a discussion of those novels, while beyond the scope of this article, would likely reveal a similar thematic pattern as the one I am delineating in The Road.