The contemporary fiction writers are invading the literary domain through their genre fiction and Cormac McCarthy’s novels are no exceptions. He has employed his unique narrative technique with a view to re-conceptualise the world today and while computing our place in it.

The experimental narrative structures in his novels are to explore the post-modern new humanism, which culminates in his novel “The Road”. There are the three inexplicable narrative elements that stand apart as glaring example of his style, discernible in much-talked about novel, “The Road”. These distinguishing features are the characters, the description of horror and novel’s spatial setting. McCarthy employs post modern narrative technique to send a chill down our spine. In amplifying the imperative need of keeping the lurking danger at bay beneath the sustainable safety and security in the natural environment in this planet in the aftermath of an apocalypse, this novel is an example. The characters in his novels as in ‘The Road’ stand as an exemplification of people who are devoid of their identities and sense of belongingness after a catastrophic diminution of the entire population, baring the solitary exception of a few survivors.

The narrative depiction of the devastated environment ensuring gargantuan disasters that has obliterated the vast majority of human civilization is laid bare through his vivid pictorial presentation. These survivors are treated as literary archetypes of new humanism in a post-apocalyptic society leading a new primitive life beginning anew from the scratch.

The novel ‘The Road’ stands as a quintessential typical genre of McCarthy. The moral bleakness and the enveloping mood of despair together with a stylistic absence of revelation of characters thought, is a style consistent with him. The third person narrative style,
typical of his works often shifts into limited first person voice. The third person narration often changes into first person narration in order to reveal the characters perspective.

McCarthy’s narrative world resorts to three main genres, namely, the western, post-apocalyptic and south gothic. In a typical post-apocalyptic world, the revelations of internal ethical struggle of moral man like the father in ‘The Road’ simply illuminate his imperfect heroism. What makes McCarthy a notable writer is his unique style with less punctuation and graphic representation of horror and violence in his works. His minimum use of punctuation marks as he very often avoids it while using conjunctions as in place of comma is his typical style. This is probably employed by him in order to give space to rapid flow of thoughts. This method of using conjunctions instead of using punctuations is known as polysyndeton.

He uses simple and assertive sentences, and periods, capitals, and colons, but does not employ semicolons. He skips quotation marks separating the dialogues as he considers the punctuation straining the paper weird little marks. As there are no punctuation marks to set them apart, McCarthy’s dialogues lack coherence, although they still retain the sense of the dialogue. But his use of language and his choice of dictions are always literally overpowering.

He does not stick to conventional style and prefers directness and vivid delineation of his thoughts. He uses simple colloquial language instead of formal ones. He does not enslave himself to grammatical rules like punctuations and spellings. This is substantiated by the following lines lifted from ‘The Road’, “The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe……….borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” In the above examples, the word ‘running’ is used as a noun and ‘sorrow’ as a verb. They accentuate the rapid flow of the text.

The theme of morality that McCarthy uses in ‘The Road’ has a softer
edge. His quest for the concept of morality is unconventional as he goes beyond the usual characters like the poor, the homeless and dispossessed, the criminal and degenerate and the outcasts. He discovers deep humanism even among these hapless and hopeless, and most despicable characters in the society. He ascribes their conditions partly to contingency, bad luck or the operations of respectable society.

One of the prominent themes in ‘The Road’ is the struggle for survival. It is apparent in the ashen landscape, in the bands of marauding men, in the disagreement between father and son about whether to help fellow survivors. ‘The Road’ is an authentic document that offers us a bleak world that would be born, if conflict were allowed to escalate unchecked.

Against the backdrop of a bleak world, McCarthy sets the theme of tender filial love. The father and son are ‘each other’s world entire’. The man’s desire to survive is for his son. The man is not afraid of his death; he yearns to like in order to seek life for the boy. Unlike his wife, the man does not wish to save his son from cannibalism by killing him. He leaves the pistol with the boy. Another theme that ‘The Road’ accentuates is the theme of good versus evil. The boy seeking confirmation from his father that they are ‘good guys’, is the proof of it. The father assures him that the good guys are those who “keep trying, they do not give up”.

“The Road” is a land breaking fictional creation in the post-modern literary world that breaks and makes genres. Besides being an apocalyptic fiction, “The Road” is also cast by critics in the frameworks of horror and science fiction genres sometime.

(This is written by research scholar Sandipani Choudhury under the guidance of Dr Swayam Prabha Satpathy, Associate Professor, Department of English, SOA University)