The Cormac McCarthy overview is a three-part writing response designed to have you demonstrate what you have concluded about the writer’s life and how his experiences have influenced the stories that he composed.
PART 1. A writer writes about what he knows.
The collection of sources that follow are designed to provide you with an insight into McCarthy’s life and his writing style. Use the complete array of information included to help you to synthesize an overview of how McCarthy’s life influenced his style of writing. Use examples from the provided sources to substantiate your observation.
PBS News: The Day Cormac McCarthy Died
A Friend’s Remembrance of Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy on Punctuation
Cormac McCarthy Inspiration for The Road
Cormac McCarthy’s Bio: Biography summary #1, Biography summary #2
Cormac McCarthy’s writing style is often characterized as sparse, unadorned, and haunting, and is known for exploring the darkest aspects of human nature. McCarthy’s writing often explores dark topics, such as poverty, alienation, crime, or violence, and features deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters. The setting of his stories are often as bleak as the characters he writes about. His prose can also be described as being minimalistic. Minimalism is a writing style that uses simple language and a straightforward plot to tell a story. It prioritizes brevity and context over literary conventions, and encourages readers to use their imagination to fill in the gaps.
- Biblical quality: McCarthy’s prose can have a biblical quality, with frequent religious references
- Punctuation: McCarthy uses periods, capitals, and the occasional comma, but almost never uses commas, quotation marks, or semi-colons
- Sentence structure: McCarthy’s writing style is often terse and simple, with short sentences followed by longer ones
- Diction: McCarthy’s diction is often simple and concise, providing only the details that are significant to the characters
PART 2. Comparing Passages
Below is a collection of passages from various Cormac McCarthy stories. Select three passages from The Road that have appealed to you in some meaningful way. Next select from the passages below three passages. Compare your selected The Road passages to the three passages that you select from below. Compare your responses based on three themes that you conclude from your comparison.
All the Pretty Horses
He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother’s uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in Spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.
In four day’s riding he crossed the Pecos at Iraan Texas and rode up out of the river breaks where the pumpjacks in the Yates Field ranged against the skyline rose and dipped like mechanical birds. Like great primitive birds welded up out of iron by hearsay in a land perhaps where such birds once had been. At that time there were still indians camped on the western plains and late in the day he passed in his riding a scattered group of their wickiups propped upon that scoured and trembling waste. They were perhaps a quarter mile to the north, just huts made from poles and brush with a few goathides draped across them. The indians stood watching him. He could see that none of them spoke among themselves or commented on his riding there nor did they raise a hand in greeting or call out to him. They had no curiosity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.
The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.
Blood Meridian
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
No Country For Old Men
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who’s layin there?”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
“My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Don’t haul stuff around with you.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Suttree
“And what happens then?
When?
After you’re dead.
Dont nothing happen. You’re dead.
You told me once you believed in God.
The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I’d like to see him for a minute if I could.
What would you say to him?
Well, I think I’d just tell him. I’d say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there’s just one thing I’d like to know. And he’ll say: what’s that? And then I’m goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together.
Suttree smiled. What do you think he’ll say?
The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it. I dont believe there is an answer. ”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
The Passenger
“There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be
incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.
p.116”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger
Child of God
“In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
“To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps. Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
The Crossing
“The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Cities of the Plain
“Our waking life’s desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
“It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it?
Yes. It does.
There’s a lot of things look better at a distance.
Yeah?
I think so. I guess there are. The life you’ve lived, for one.
Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
PART 3. Faith and The Road
Consider the following quotes on faith that may capture your understanding of the denouement of the novel The Road. Select a faith quote and explain how the quote relates to your perspective of the novel by using three specific examples from the story that corroborate your observation.
“Faith: not wanting to know what is true.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Faith is a passionate intuition.”
William Wordsworth
“Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.”
Voltaire
“Doubt Is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.”
Khalil Gibran
“Faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”
John Green
“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
“And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.” – Matthew 21:22
“God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars.”
Elbert Hubbard
“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Faith is the daring of the soul to go farther than it can see.”
William Newton Clarke
“Man cannot live without faith because the prime requisite in life’s adventure is courage, and the sustenance of courage is faith.”
Henry Emerson Fosdick
“In the affairs of this World, Men are saved, not by Faith, but by the want of it.”
Benjamin Franklin
“All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The ever-lasting friend you have in life is faith.”
Hugh Dwyer