Cormac McCarthy Style

Cormac McCarthy has grown to be one of my favorite authors throughout the past year. His style has been the key in keeping me hooked and making sure that the book moves along at a breakneck pace. Perhaps I relate to his simple sentences and seeming lack of respect for syntax, punctuation and grammar but I can’t help but like it for its efficiency. So far, I’ve read The Road, All the Pretty Horses, and No Country for Old Men, all of which have the same general style, with a few minor details changed. I’m going to take a more general look at McCarthy’s style rather than focusing on any of the three in particular, but I will try to draw more from No Country for Old Men since that is the one I read most recently (and the one I can do a long blog on).

In my Junior year I went through the joy that was AP Language and Composition. While I did enjoy the class, the book choices were far from my favorite. For example, in contrast to McCarthy, Frederick Douglass chose to drag out his sentences for as long as humanly possible using semicolons. I recognize that this is actually extremely good sentence structure, and that his use of Logos, Ethos and Pathos were nearly flawless. Yes, Frederick Douglass is a genius when it comes to writing, but it just feels painful to have to read a sentence that is a page long and then sit there and analyze it for the next 10 minutes to fully understand its meaning. The themes in McCarthy’s writing are communicated clearly and artistically without being too unsubtle. Rather than posing arguments like other authors, he chooses to get his point across mostly through dialogue and actions of characters. One clear example is the idea of “carrying the fire” from The Road. It’s something that the boy and the father talk about somewhat rarely throughout the book. Most of the non-dialogue sections only talk about very physical things like food, cold, rain and other people. Ideas such as carrying the fire can’t really be brought up all that much as they struggle to meet their basic physiological needs. This is present also during No Country for Old Men when he is fighting for his life after returning to where he got the money: 

“He got out his keys and his billfold and buttoned them into his shirtpocket. The cold wind blowing off the water smelled of iron. He could taste it.“

 But you can clearly see the man and boy carrying the fire and keeping their morals throughout the book, even when there isn’t explicit dialogue about it. The dialogue is only there to make it clear that the man is passing the fire to the boy and to help make it clear what purpose carrying the fire accomplishes. 

Again, I want to emphasize that just because McCarthy uses short sentences doesn’t mean that his writing lacks complexity. His use of vivid imagery, metaphors and similes help me actually imagine what it is like in the novels as well as the novel’s mood. The Road’s depressing and lonely atmosphere was palpable throughout the entire novel; the beauty of nature and the sense of adventure in the beginning of All the Pretty Horses sucked me in and made me want to keep reading; the desperation and hopelessness in some of No Country for Old Men’s scenes made it impossible to stop reading. One example of the use of simile in McCarthy’s comes from The Road:

“By dusk of the day following they were at the city. The long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk”.

Out of all the novels I will say that All the Pretty Horses was the best in terms of imagery and mood. Each part in the novel had very distinct moods and each one was extremely successful in communicating it.

Maybe my love of McCarthy really just stems from me being bad at reading, but I won’t lie by saying he isn’t one of my favorite authors. Had his novels been written by Frederick Douglass instead I would never have chosen his books if offered the choice. In the future my goal is to perhaps learn a little and work to improve my own writing using his. Although, maybe you would prefer if I did use punctuation.