Style in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

By M. Thomas

Stylistically speaking, sometimes writing for the sake of complexity stretches far away from a target audience. When sending a text, a bygone word such as “indubitably” is almost never used unless the author is aiming to either impress or humor someone. Texts often come in short bursts - unless looking only at an older generation of texters - with little to no grammatical thought put into them. Contrary to any official or academic style of writing, the plain style of writing is favored for the majority of modern writing done outside of a professional setting: otherwise known as a social setting. That being said, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all have millions of examples of this style of writing. However, none of those examples are necessarily surprising or unique. Sure, plain style allows people to communicate with one another in a social setting, but something far more fascinating to me is Cormac McCarthy's employment of it in his novel The Road.

            There is absolutely no need to move anywhere past the first page in The Road when looking for examples of plain style:

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than 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. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang” (McCarthy, 1). 

            One of the immediate things to notice in McCarthy’s writing is the lack of punctuation, something that would annoy someone’s mother or perhaps a friend who is also not-so-secretly a member of the grammar police. There are moments where a conjunction is uncomfortably used without a comma, and sentences end and begin much more suddenly than in most other fiction pieces. There are more complex words that McCarthy uses such as “glaucoma” and “flowstone” in his writing, but his language and imagery that he allows any reader to process within his stylistically-short sentences is what makes his writing unique and mold-breaking as compared to many other strictly creative-style authors of countless other novels of similar subjects, themes, and topics.

Approaching writing a novel with the intention of communicating concisely with the reader is McCarthy’s formula for success, and it endlessly depends on plain-style and no-nonsense techniques. In a quote accredited to an article in Open Culture, McCarthy stated, “There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate” (Jones). While it is arguable that McCarthy may not be writing in an entirely correct way, and he has made plenty of people squirm with his plain style of writing, he has written many different novels and stories in this style, and all of them are focused on one thing in particular: clarity.

            Plain styles of writing are often incredibly concise and clear in what they mean to communicate while avoiding heavy jargon and complex concepts that readers may not fully understand. McCarthy’s writing aims to avoid those complex concepts used in academic and scholarly writing and instead writes in the aforementioned plain style While there are plenty of creative and therefore ambiguous aspects to McCarthy’s writing, he spends lots of time excluding things such as quotation marks (one of his most infamous stylistic choices) in order to take all the jumble that he possibly can off of the page. In stead of the removed quotation marks, McCarthy relies specifically on spacing and indentation to communicate any conversation between characters in his stories:

“The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.

I’m right here.

I know” (McCarthy, 2).

While in the top section of that writing, a reader may not notice that someone has begun talking due to the lack of quotation marks, McCarthy’s heavy reliance on indentation always pays off as verbal communication between characters surprisingly does not only rely on the presence of quotation marks, but instead relies on two things: quotation marks and indentation, and only one of which must be present. In his writing, McCarthy has faith that people will comprehend textual clues given to them and interpret dialogue as conversation between characters. Many authors choose to write in ways that assume an audience to have some members which require as many cues as possible to follow a story, but McCarthy’s writing methods have proven that a general audience can discern conversation via only one or two contextual clues/patterns. In an interview with Oprah, McCarthy stated, “You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks and write in such a way as to guide people as to who’s speaking” (Oprah). In McCarthy’s writing, it is easy to see that he is able to guide people with such a simple technique while using arguably simple and plain language as well. McCarthy uses a plain style of writing in an unexpectedly creative way, breaking boundaries between two often separate categories of writing.

The clarity of McCarthy’s writing is something rather rare among writers, but it is a creative decision that has worked in his favor both in the number of volumes he has sold, and his overall popularity as a writer. While I had never heard of Cormac McCarthy before reading The Road in a high school English classroom, his style of writing is revolutionary when it comes to the combination of plain and creative styles. Hopefully, more writers will take influence from McCarthy and learn to work outside of those unwritten rules which constrain writers to tapping the quotation mark key every time there is dialogue, and using a comma with conjunctions.

Works Cited

Jones, John. "Cormac Mccarthy’S Three Punctuation Rules, And How They All Go Back To James Joyce". Open Culture, 2022, https://www.openculture.com/2013/08/cormac-mccarthys-punctuation-rules.html?adlt=strict&toWww=1&redig=F53FE94C9E5045DA938038F74E8F6979.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Pan Macmillan, 2006.

McCarthy, Cormac. "Cormac Mccarthy On The Power Of The Subconscious". Interview by Oprah Winfrey. 2022.