Structure and Motifs (AKA: The World's most creative Title)

Many believe that one of the marks of good writing is an alignment between the structure of the writing and its meaning.  The Road is an excellent example of this skill.  The primary purpose of many of the stylistic elements in The Road is to convey the nature of the character’s existence. 

To start, the book has no chapters; it just goes on and on and on.  At times, the passages get choppier, which helps to slow the narrative down, but there aren’t any real breaks -- everything that happens just melds together, day in and day out.  At times, several days pass by in mere sentences.  This structure closely mirrors the lives of the characters.  Sure, there are some memorable moments (memorable can mean good, i.e. finding the bunker, or bad, i.e. running into a skewered and cooked infant), but for the most part their existence is one long stretch of miserableness.   The father hasn’t even “kept a calendar for years” (McCarthy 2).  What’s the point?

The melding of time and feeling of monotony generated by the lack of chapters is recreated on a smaller scale throughout the book.  The sentences are long and, at times, repetitive.  They frequently string together conjunctions instead of using punctuation.  Take a look at these:

“He untied the tarp and folded it back and rummaged through the canned goods and came up with a tin of fruit cocktail and took the can opener from his pocket and opened the tin and folded back the lid and walked over and squatted and handed it to the boy.” (McCarthy 173)

“So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it’s not true.” (McCarthy 183)

“In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of a mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.” (McCarthy 19)

Not all the sentences are this extreme, but ones like these are fairly prevalent.  In contrast, dialogue tends to be curt.  One person doesn’t usually say more than a sentence or a handful of words.  This use of shorter sentence structure reveals how horrible the world around the characters is (they don’t want to talk about it) and how social interaction has become frail and sparse.

Furthermore, McCarthy likes to squish words together.  I can’t believe it took me this long to realize it, but contractions such as “don’t” and “can’t” are crushed into “dont” and “cant” (McCarthy 183, 184).  Word pairs are combined into single words as well, such as “oldfashioned,” “ironcolored,” “workshoes,” and “eyesockets” (McCarthy 195, 208, 227, 228).  When used in speech, these abbreviated phrases suggest that the characters aren’t putting much effort into speaking – they’re just letting the words slide out and slur together.  On the other hand, when the phrases are describing the setting, they align with the illustration of a continuous and bleak environment.

At times, descriptive passages in The Road can seem like they only exist to generate a mood or atmosphere, but tiny details can be revealing.  For instance, the house full of cannibal victims has “white doric columns” (McCarthy 111).  If you google some pictures of Doric columns, you’ll see that they resemble bones – which throughout the story have, understandably, been linked to death.  In contrast, one of the more recent houses the protagonists find has elements of “Palladian” architecture (McCarthy 219).  Palladian architecture was inspired by Greek and Roman temples, suggesting a spiritual significance to the house.  In the story, it has food, is devoid of threats, and encourages the father to think about whether his ancestors are watching him.

One last thing I’d like to point out before transitioning to looking at motifs is a bizarre switch in the point of view.  The vast majority of the book is in third person.  However, on page 91 it switches to first person from (I believe) the perspective of the father.  I’m not quite sure what to make of this. 

Alright, onto motifs.  McCarthy’s writing is highly symbolic – understanding his motifs is critical to getting his meaning.

I feel that my general ideas about the meaning of colors from my first blog post are accurate, but some of my more specific concepts don’t really fit anymore.  For instance, there is definitely an aspect of the color blue related to false hope.  The ocean that they hoped would offer them a better chance at survival is “black… cold… desolate… [and] birdless” (McCarthy 230).  The boy hoped it would be blue (McCarthy 230).  If it was blue, that would indicate there was life and food; it would be reminiscent of the old sea.  But, that hope was unfounded and false.  Still, earlier I read too deeply into it being an indicator of an immediate threat or betrayal. 

Currently, I think blue and green together represent the illusion of a better world, usually the past.    When they find the bunker, the father “[ducks] under a lantern with a green metal shade” and sees “the richness of a forgotten world” (McCarthy 147).  Later, when they take a bath – an incredible luxury for them now – the only light is from the “ring of blue teeth in the burner of the stove” (McCarthy 155).  Neither of these experiences are permanent.  There’s some evidence of this meaning for blue and green in my original post as well.  McCarthy uses this motif to create a deeper meaning.  The father finds a Spanish coin with a “deep crust of verdigris” (McCarthy 217).  Verdigris is the bright blue-green coating which forms on copper when it oxidizes.  He has to “[drop] the coin and [hurry] to catch up to the boy” when confronted with the reality of “the gray country and the gray sky” (McCarthy 217).  “When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be… then you will have given up” (McCarthy 202).  To survive people must drop those dreams and carry on.

Fire is also an important motif.  The father believes they’re the “good guys” because “[they’re] carrying the fire” (McCarthy 86).  Fire is what keeps them warm at night.  It melts away the gray snow and its light seeps through the blackness.  Fires are the “dim and shapeless [lights] in the murk” that indicate to the father that there are (or at least were) other people out there (McCarthy 200).  Unfortunately, fire carries a rather sinister meaning as well.  The world is burnt… fire is what made it that way.  The father and his wife “[sit] at the window and [eat] in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and [watch] distant cities burn" (McCarthy 60).  Additionally, there are still “thin black trees burning on the slopes like stands of heathen candles" (McCarthy 50).  The impacts of these fires are everywhere, from the “figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling,” (McCarthy 203) to the omnipresent ash.  In addition, the colors of fire, red and orange, are also the colors of one of the mobile armies of rapists and cannibals (McCarthy 95).  The contrasting depictions of fire raise, again, one of the novel’s central questions: is it worth it to survive?   The very thing that symbolizes and enables their survival is also what ravaged the world to the horrific state it is in, suggesting that McCarthy’s answer is “no.”  His answer could also be a different question entirely: does it even matter?

“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 unremarked as the path of any nameless sister world in the ancient dark beyond.” (McCarthy 192)