The Road: Style 1 key example

Unusual diction, garbled syntax, free indirect discourse, and fragmented sentences all bear the traces of writers like Faulkner and Joyce. In its use of these techniques, the work expresses Modernist influences in their most commanding forms. McCarthy’s prose famously swings from terse descriptions to run-on sentences that overwhelm the reader, often with little in between. The novel takes in the man and boy’s surroundings in monotone, for instance: “solitary and dogged. A raw hill country. Aluminum houses.” Dialogue, which consists mostly of one-word responses, is similarly uncommunicative. In a work devoid of quotation marks and even character names, this style develops a stony sense of silence.

At other points, though, the novel’s prose waxes uncontrollably. As the man and boy return from the abandoned locomotive back onto the road, McCarthy reflects on the tedium of survival through one of many instances of polysyndeton (the repeated use of a coordinating conjunction, in this case "and"):

Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

Cite this Quote

The run-on quality of such sentences suggests another sense of weariness, as though the novel itself is deeply burdened by the weight of this hostile, indiscriminate world. The clauses follow after each other in unending succession, expressing fatigue. Deaths happen, suns set, and days pass, with no breath or relief in between.

Another of the novel’s Modernist hallmarks is its unconventional use of vocabulary. While describing the man’s repair work, McCarthy resorts to technical terminology—“collet,” “bucksaw,” and “valvestream”—and gives a sense of the resourcefulness necessary for survival. Other words are purely esoteric: terms like “salitter” or “decalced” bear religious or mystic connotations that reflect a desire for spiritual reconnection. Dense diction meanwhile pushes some sentences near the verge of incomprehensibility. When the man wakes up at night, “he rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.” What does “autistic” dark look like? What, exactly, are “vestibular calculations”? McCarthy’s wordplay places terms into new contexts and confuses the reader—almost as if to imply that, in this unfamiliar reality, words too have lost their meanings.