Mccarthy Auster the Human Experience

Mccarthy Auster

The Human Experience in the Road and the Invention of Solitude

Cormac McCarthy has an unmistakable prose style. What do you see as the most distinctive features of that style? How is the writing in the Road in some ways more like poetry than narrative prose?

McCarthy's prose in the Road is spare and moody. And indeed, the reader is bound to read this almost as a form of poetry in the halting manner and streaming flow of sentence fragments which paint this bleak portrait. Even from the opening moments of the story, there is an impending sense of doom which permeates the sentiments of our protagonist and which envelopes he and his son.

McCarthy describes the man and his son in their struggle for survival, telling of "nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one that what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath." (McCarthy, 3) Here, the most distinctive feature of his writing is bluntly concise way that the author delivers a sense of the utter desolation and despair in this world. Its eschewing of traditional sentence structure in favor of something that reads more like stanzas helps to reinforce the certainty in the language, that life is fleeting and bitter. And the horrifying nightmarish apparition that appears to the protagonist in a dream drives home the purpose of this writing style, to reinforce the monstrous tension of always present danger.

2. Why do you think McCarthy has chosen not to give his characters names? How do the generic labels of "the man" and "the boy" affect the way in which readers relate to them?

McCarthy's decision to refrain from naming the two characters in his novel suggests not an interest in disassociating the reader emotionally, as we may at first suspect. Indeed, the story and the relationship between father and son are significant to drive the reader to a sense of terrified empathy. However, the absence of names suggests instead a larger force of destruction at play. Here, it is the crumbling of society that has removed the demand for their names.

The names by which they might have been known -- the father in the time before the unmentioned apocalyptic event and the son if he had perhaps been born in a different time -- are of little use to them where relationships rarely extend outside of their dyad.

And perhaps even of greater importance is the sense that survival is of far more importance than such attachments as those which symbolize a relationship to a lost civilization. Indeed, survival or the evasion of suffering capture every waking moment, compelling us with the understanding that both father and son could soon be dead. With this weight on the minds of readers, it seems only appropriate that the father and son embody the concept of human survival most simply and unadorned by conceptions of individuality.

3. How is McCarthy able to make the postapocalyptic world of the Road seem so real and utterly terrifying? Which descriptive passages are especially vivid and visceral in their depiction of this blasted landscape? What do you find to be the most horrifying features of this world and the survivors who inhabit it.

Quite certainly, the most horrifying feature of McCarthy's world is the complete and total disappearance of civility. The man and his son are so demonstrably complex in this story, even if their survival motives are simple and clear. Particularly, even as they endure a world of cannibalism and tribalism, the two struggle mightily to maintain a sense of moral turpitude, even to the point of impracticality.

This is perhaps the most tangibly real element of McCarthy's text, which focuses significant attention to the scorched landscape and its implications. In the passage where McCarthy introduces us to this landscape, he describes the man in a state of observation, telling that "when it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into thte murk. The soft ask blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke." (McCarthy, 4) the description is a hauntingly real manifestation of our nightmares in this age of global warming. Perhaps the most real and threatening aspect of McCarthy's work is its seeming absence of need to make mention of the event which caused this catastrophe. Instead, we are left to presume that it is our fault, which strikes quite close to home.

PART 2

1. Auster and Self-Reliance

Paul Auster's the Invention of Solitude is less a novel than it is a meditation of life, death, humanity and mortality. Somewhat absent of a narrative, it is instead the author's examination of themes and thoughts which have crowded his head in the wake of his emotionally remote father's death. In large part, the work at first seems a criticism of Auster's father, who has remained aloof from all others in the world until and beyond his death.

However, with further reading, we find that Auster has himself unknowingly earned some of his greatest strengths of personal fortitude and self-reliance both in the observance of his father and in the absence of personal fulfillment which he received from that relationship. In many ways, this captures the understanding which comes to permeate the latter half of the novel, showing the author to be positively compelled toward emotional responsibility based on the strength of independence, which ultimately makes him a better husband and father.