/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21634950]

This is a perfect book. It's genuinely the most difficult book I've ever had to read (because of the content). Nothing's ever made me feel quite like this book does.

[Anonymous No.21634986]

>>21634950
It's the antithesis of King's The Stand to be sure.

[Anonymous No.21635060]

The start through midway is beyond excellent but it spoils the reader's appetite and the latter half falls almost flat and fizzles out. It was too quick a read to inspire that brutal unending misery that the ending would've required in my opinion.

P4444W

[Anonymous No.21635192]

>>21634950
I like that bit when he's playing the flute and
>The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all be carried off by wolves

[Anonymous No.21635238]

>>21635192
I don't remember that but it's very nice.

[Anonymous No.21635242]

>>21634950
The Road is an end-of-the-world story where the world simply ends.

[Anonymous No.21635433]

>>21635242
The world ends in On the Beach

[Anonymous No.21635651]

>>21634950
I thought it was a 3/5.

[Anonymous No.21635691]

>>21634950
lol just play dayz

[Anonymous No.21635750]

>>21635433
You mean the "world as we know it" ends in On the beach. The Road is exclusively the Death throes of the world. It fades away slowly, not explodes and is gone.

[Anonymous No.21635803]

>>21635651
But do you think it's a 6/10?

[Anonymous No.21635862]

>>21634950
/r/ books is that way ----->

[Anonymous No.21635906]

>>21635242
>where the world simply ends.
Fuckin hundred pages about carrying the fire and people still don’t understand.

[Anonymous No.21635909]

>>21634950
How would you compare it to Blood Meridian?

[Anonymous No.21636006]

>>21635433
Based Nevil Shute appreciator.

[Anonymous No.21636196]

>>21635862
Sorry you have no paternal instinct, sissy.

[Anonymous No.21636254]

>>21635906
>carryin fire
That's just cope. Like going south to sea is also a cope. Artificial purpose in a purposeless stagnated world.

[Anonymous No.21636385]

>>21636254
I think you should read the last page of the book again.

[Anonymous No.21637043]

>>21634950
> It's genuinely the most difficult book I've ever had to read (because of the content).
i hope youre joking

[Anonymous No.21637177]

>>21637043
>hurr durr lets bash a mans opinions while violently jerking off to a picture of myself

[Anonymous No.21637306]

>>21635433
>>21636006
Read all kinds of Shute for free, here:
https://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Norway,%20Nevil%20Shute

[Anonymous No.21637749]

>Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

[Anonymous No.21638154]

>>21636254
Filtered.

[Anonymous No.21638318]

Borrowed world and borrowed time and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it

[Anonymous No.21638463]

>>21634950
You'll want to read this then

[Anonymous No.21639209]

>>21634950
finished it in one sitting. never did that for a book before

[Anonymous No.21639810]

okay

[Anonymous No.21641425]

>>21637177
gonna cry?

[Anonymous No.21641521]

>>21641425
n-no

[Anonymous No.21641924]

>>21634950
What a great book.

[Anonymous No.21642294]

>>21637749
Sally Rooney could never

[Anonymous No.21642299]

>>21635909
completely different - the only thing similar are the beautiful descriptions of the world.

[Anonymous No.21643620]

>>21636254
going south was for a practical purpose. not artificial. they're going south to outrun the increasingly harsh nuclear winter. I'm sure if the man survived, and the story went on for another chapter or two. they would have made it to the equator. the weather would be nice. it'd have been peachy. and there would have been farms full of food growing and towns full of friendly people all carrying the fire.

[Anonymous No.21643737]

>>21643620
HOLY COPE
>nuclear winter
Citation needed

[Anonymous No.21643815]

>>21643737
>HOLY COPE
Don't talk to me like that, please. it's weird

Am I wrong? I was pretty sure it's outright said in the book that's they're going south to escape the increasingly inhospitable cold. that's killing the plants. and, from memory. I'm pretty sure the cause of the apocalypse was implied to be nuclear bombs. But, ambiguously implied. So maybe an asteroid either. in that bit in the story when he's remembering the day it happened. and they see the flashes from their window. and he immediately starts filling bathtub. that was a city being nuked, right? but if it was an asteroid, that'd effectively cause the same thing as a nuclear winter too.

or, you think they're heading south for the same reason like in On the Beach. how the whole northern hemisphere blows each other up with nukes instantly as soon as the cold war went hot. but then Australia. all the way south has to just sit and wait a few months as the poisonous radiation drifts across the planet and inevitably kills all life?

[Anonymous No.21643832]

>>21643620
>>21643815
I always thought that it was the Yellowstone eruption and thats why there was so much ash and so many earthquakes.

[Anonymous No.21643858]

>>21643832
>>21643815
>>21643737
>>21635242
The science-fiction writer John Clute cuts through the critical clutter: "The central riddle of The Road is God." I couldn't agree more, but I can't quite agree with his final opinion: "It is a story I for one find it impossible to think of as being redeemed by a Christ. It is a story about the end of the world in which the world ends." In other words, Clute's answer to my question is nothing, there's nothing at the end of the road. Such a statement "in which the world ends" strikes me as too categorical for The Road or for McCarthy's work as a whole, of which The Road, presaged over and again from The Orchard Keeper onward, is both a logical continuation and a kind of termination. I believe, with Edwin T. Arnold, that McCarthy's work is grounded in moral choice. Clute's statement "you remove the Christ figure and you are left with virtually nothing" leaves little room for choice, but I think the novel, in its own contradictory way, does. How then do we go about examining the relative evidence for and against God in The Road? We look directly at the text, at what McCarthy intentionally did or did not write. What and where is the textual evidence working against God, what and where is the evidence working for God? And how do they stack up? In the novel's second fragment we can begin to accumulate the evidence against God. There is a simple description of the setting as "Barren, silent, godless" (4). A few pages later a single snowflake sifts down: "He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom" (16). It's the boy who catches the snowflake but the narrator's simile is hardly of the boy's imagining. Sometimes McCarthy reverses the religious reference for negative effect as in this un-writing of Genesis by the man: "The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. [. . .] The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality" (88-9). Subtract the idiom and you subtract the referent - the un-reification of God.

[Anonymous No.21643859]

>>21643832
that's good too. hadn't thought of that

[Anonymous No.21643868]

>>21643858
Beyond the pervasive horror and starkness and gloom that never cease, probably the most unimpeachable godlessness comes in this descriptive prose poem: "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relendess circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The
blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover." If there's a god out there somewhere, he's not very evident. The narrator or the man - it's often hard to distinguish between them - laments this state of affairs as irremediable: "Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it" (130). Relendess, intestate, implacable, blind, crushing, hunted, trembling - is there a more ferocious description anywhere of our borrowed world?

If that hyper-McCarthy prose poem is the most negative ponderation on God, the most intriguing is surely the father and son's encounter with the old man who calls himself Ely. Their conversation treats survival, death and God, but it raises more questions than it answers. Ely, whether it's real or some perverse nom de guerre, is the only person in the novel endowed with any sort of proper name. Why? What - beyond urging the critics to hustle - is the significance of the name? Some of the criticism takes Ely to allude to Elijah, a connection I fail to see except on the most superficial level - the wise old biblical prophet, other than caricature or intentional reversal, he is not; even less is he Melville's Elijah from Chapter 19 of Moby Dick - and I don't understand any link beyond some weird possible version of Elijah's sharing of the Passover meal, a flimsy tie, for what it's worth, seen also by Phillip A. Snyder (81) in the context of hospitality.

Why not Ely itself? I mean E-L-Y, but pronounced Eel-ee (possibly derived from eels), the city on the River Great Ouse in Cambridgeshire, the cathedral of which is called the Ship of Fens, popularly believed to be built on Cromwell's Rock, on a meteorite that may have helped put the dinosaurs out of business (Ely Ghosts).

[Anonymous No.21643876]

>>21643868
Most readers tend to think that the unspecified catastrophe in the novel is man-made, but if so, why does McCarthy deliberately fail to say so, either in the novel or in subsequent interviews? What if it's God-made or a catastrophic accident? McCarthy remarked somewhat facetiously in an interview in the Wall Street Journal: "I don't have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I'm with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them," as if they were privy to information beyond his ken. "But it could be anything - volcanic activity or it could be a nuclear war. It's not really important" (Jurgensen). The only critic I have read so far who wants to keep the question open is Jay Ellis, who does not decide between "nuclear winter, or the calamitous climate change sped up by a comet strike" (28). The interview, even given McCarthy's well known propensity for hermetic or enigmatic pronouncements, only strengthens the possibility that the catastrophe was not necessarily man-made.

If we accept McCarthy's ingenuousness or ingeniousness, we also have to accept the somewhat outrageous notion that the only proper name in the novel (other than Rock City, of which Ely could be a reiteration, in which case Ely would be the rock of the un-church) coincides, at least in the popular mind, with a great physical disaster, which did to the dinosaurs what the current disaster in the novel is doing to man. And then we must ask if it's also coincidental that this character Ely, the only one with a name, is the one to tell us: "There is no God," an utterly un-Elijah-like judgment that he promptly reiterates: "There is no God and we are his prophets" (170) - And why does he look like
"a starved and threadbare buddha" (168) and talk like the prophet Mohammed? That sort of multi-religious palimpsest is clearly contrived, but to what end? Is McCarthy deriding "diversity"? Are we meant to believe Ely? Maybe he's just crazy, or maybe he's right and crazy, or maybe he's trying to tell us in his own crazy Nietzschean way that God is so utterly removed from us as to be dead, an idea Jay Ellis flirts with when he writes of: "[. . .] the larger philosophy we keep
determining in these novels - including McCarthy's sense of god as a kind of absent parent no longer able, or willing, to do anything" (35), a sense that echoes tangentially Leo Daugherty's Gnostic reading of Blood Meridian. The disaster may not be caused by man, but the episode with Ely can only reinforce any case against any God other than a totally absent one, no matter how eccentric or contrived Ely himself may be.

[Anonymous No.21643891]

>>21643876
Another of those prose poems occurs in a kind of flashback or memory: "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" (181). The passage sounds like certain descriptions from Suttree and something like the first chapter of Ecclesiastes. The key word, for my purposes, is "unremarked," which seems to indicate a nonexistent or uncaring God. The passage echoes one from early in the novel: "The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air" (11). These passages point convincingly to nothingness and doubtless are among the major reasons the novel has been labeled nihilistic or godless. There is also a brief fragment that would seem to deny any after life: "Do you think your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground" (196). This denial seems to issue straight from the man as does a subsequent passage of the same type: "I think maybe they are watching, he said. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back" (210). Who are "they," we are forced to ask, ghosts, angels, archons, aeons, gods? There is no answer and all that is clear is the quandary itself, yet the very nature of the question, at once rhetorical and pointed, seems to signal some Eliot-like turning, however bleakly. Is it some spark - "the thing that even death cannot
undo" - that they must see in order not to turn away?

The textual case for God, or more specifically a Christlike figure in
the boy, difficult to imagine without some a priori God, however aloof, comprises more evidence than the negative case, and more convincingly. We can understand much of the material by stringing it together, almost without explication, beginning with this passage, which is the first we hear of the boy: "He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke" (5). Shortly after they emerge from the mountains, the father, having left their camp, observes: "When he rose and turned to go back the tarp was lit from within where the boy had wakened. Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world. Something all but unaccountable. And so it was" (48). Except for being unaccountable, this phenomenon - whatever it describes - is wholly unremarked in the narrative or in the criticism, but it foreshadows much of what follows. That foreshadowing, while easily slipping by unnoticed here, cannot be anything other than explicit and intentional.

[Anonymous No.21643898]

>>21643891
Some twenty pages later, as the father washes the roadrat's gore from his son's hair, comes the first direct inkling of the boy's role: "All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them" (74). Messiah, of course, means anointed one and while this passage does not proclaim a messiah, it does plant a seed of implication, especially when on the next page we read that the man "sat beside him and stroked his pale and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god" (75). Someone - the father, the narrator, the reader, the critic - is making suggestions we cannot simply ignore. Then the boy himself begins to make pronouncements. First he says that nothing bad will happen to them, "Because we're carrying the
fire" (83), when there is no fire and they're about to sleep in a car with only suit coats piled on for warmth. This figurative fire will become a central motif for the boy's sacred nature, which the man will continue to assert, as when he asks Ely: "What if I said he's a god?" (172), a role
the boy will eventually take for himself. When the boy answers the man, saying that he is the one "who has to worry about everything," saying, "Yes I am. . .I am the one" (259), he is echoing Jesus in a number of instances - I am the way, the truth and the light (John 14:6); I am the door of the sheep (John 10:7); I am the light of the world (John 8:12); I am the alpha and the omega (Revelation 1:8), to mention a few of the most obvious. Suffice it to say the proclamation "I am" is among the strongest phrases in the Old and New Testaments, the latter inevitably an echo of God's pronouncement to Moses: "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus 3:14). Not only does the boy offer to take responsibility, he offers to do so in unmistakably religious language, with none of the equivocation or contradiction so evident in Ely's negative discourse. The boy, born after the disaster, has been raised, we must assume, without church or scripture, and his scriptural echoes must therefore issue forth from narrative design or divine inspiration. There cannot be - not in a Cormac McCarthy novel -inadvertent echoes or unintentional allusions.

[Anonymous No.21643914]

>>21643898
Later the boy asks: "Is it real? The fire?" and the man answers: "It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it" (278-9). Is that the figurative fire of civilization? I think it means - textually, in this novel - less something vaguely Promethean than the literal belief in or presence of God or at the very least some entrapped divine spark of the Gnostics. My reading stems not from any innate desire to interpret the text that way. Rather it seems the weightier of two intentionally conflicting possible readings or discourses, set out as though the narrator himself were engaged in some mono-dialogical debate meant to be attended and adjudged by the reader. Alongside the fire motif runs a light motif - when there is in this darkest of worlds no source of light - that only reinforces the sacred nature of the boy: "There was light all about him" and "when he moved the light moved with him" (277). The man is compelled to comment: "There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today" (277), an inference, by the father at least, that the boy incarnates some second coming. Finally, there are two poignant words that I believe strengthen the textual case for God. The first is salitter: word used rather exclusively by Jacob Boehme (or commentary on him, as by Hegel), the Lutheran mystic clearly familiar to McCarthy, to judge nowhere beyond the two citations, one used as epigraph and the other reversed as subtitle, for Blood Meridian. Salitter - there could be a dissertation on this usage eventually, as well as a study on the meaning of fire and light as God and Christ in Jacob Boehm and Cormac McCarthy - means divine essence, the stuff of God (not unlike the Tao or Brahman, or in quantum physics the matrix of Max Planck): "He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth" (261). John Clute properly underlines the vital importance of this sole word, acknowledging God's presence but believing that "the Christ figure must somehow be seen - be felt - to transcend the drying of the divine out of the earth." I agree, at least to the point that Clute has put his finger in the wound. The central question would seem to be precisely that: Does the Christ-like figure of the boy transcend - or reverse or compensate for - such an absence or withdrawal? It is reasonable to argue, as Clute does, that the answer is no. But what are we to make of this passage, giving us the second poignant word, just before the father dies: . .he [the man] would raise his weeping eyes and see him [the boy] standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle" (273)?

[Anonymous No.21643920]

>>21643898
I got 1 paragraph through this wall of complete shite and couldn't go on.
TLDR please and thx desu.

[Anonymous No.21643928]

>>21643914
Tabernacle: In general terms, a place of worship. For the Old Testament Hebrews a tent for the Ark of the Covenant. For Catholics the receptacle for the Eucharist, the Host, the body of Christ. Is the father delirious or divinatory: "from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacled If the father is in some mortal delirium - there is nothing in the text to so indicate - then Clute is still in cogent territory. But regardless, why tabernacle, why the singularly most ecumenical term imaginable to express the essence of God? And what if the man is seeing into the future, or what if the boy does indeed glow? What if McCarthy is not making a reasonable or cogent argument?

The last thing the father says is: "Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again" (281). The father dies, the boy stays with him the emblematic three days and then as if on cue or as if preordained or as if popped from a machine, Parka-man "hove into view" (281). The critics who say that Parka-man is a deus ex machina are right, and that is precisely the point. His woman, who welcomes the boy, doesn't talk to him of civilization, she talks to him about God and tells him that "the breath of God was his breath" (286). If McCarthy didn't want us to read it the way I just have, why did he write it that way? Why say goodness will find the boy and have goodness find the boy? Why drag out a deliberate and undisguised deus ex machina - no one could seriously argue that McCarthy was unaware of the fact - if what you want to do is deny any sort of deus? And it's not just goodness that finds the boy but a new and this time caring mother, the mother that does not exist for that long list of road warriors we started with, the mother absent or defective in all those novels, every single one of them, including most especially this one, and not just goodness but warm caring affectionate understanding maternal goodness - quite the opposite of the mother who abandons the boy - the only such maternal goodness, all one short paragraph of it, in virtually all of McCarthy's work. If the message is meant to be nothing more than the withdrawal of whatever Gnostic substance there is out there, why have as the subject of the last paragraph of the plotted novel a mother who is not only all of the foregoing, but also a mother who understands how to explain the unexplainable without attempting to force any belief on the boy? What's at the end of The Road? What textually, with no need to adduce scientific opinion from the ironically named Santa Fe Institute? Stabat mater, not yet dolorosa. And that mother who is there, standing there, not yet grieving, means that the pistol-packing, fire-carrying boy, the light-bearing boy, the golden chalice and glowing tabernacle of an anointed boy who honors all the prophets and whom goodness has found is who and what we have. He and she - mother and child reunion - are the final image of the plotted novel.

[Anonymous No.21643935]

>>21643928
It's not just that the novel's "literary passion defies the very emptiness that it proclaims," as John Cant has written (197). No, it's much more: It's that the rhetorical cloud of melancholy and pessimism and doom that informs the novel from the opening dream onward and that indeed pervades most, if not all, of McCarthy's work, has lifted. "The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn't forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time" (286). Here, I am reaffirming Jay Ellis' optimistic reading of "The ending [that] provides us for the first time in a McCarthy novel with a full family" (37), but I want to go a step beyond that assertion and nail my reading in a text that is pure McCarthy: "She would talk to him some times about God." That sentence describes an intentionally and pointedly repeated action, not the indefinite future of "She would talk to him sometime about God," but "She would talk to him sometimes about God," and that single letter "s," showing us a continued and continuing action, opens us to the only remotely happy ending in all of McCarthy's work, scented as it is with the boy's breath that is the breath of God.

Could be the gypsy of The Crossing needs to make an exception. I think McCarthy is telling us, finally, that there is a special case on the road. You could no doubt attribute the change to McCarthy's son, John Francis, about whom he has spoken glowingly and to whom he dedicated The Road, but the biographical argument isn't necessary. The evidence is in the text.

[Anonymous No.21643936]

>>21643935
>I think McCarthy is telling us
I'll make up my own mind
faggot.

[Anonymous No.21643946]

>>21643935
EPILOGUE

I have dealt above with what I call the plotted novel - but there is still that last stunning and cryptic paragraph, almost as disconnected from the preceding narrative as the epilogue of Blood Meridian is from its narrative. It is distinct in tone and voice and time and perspective from the novel, raising more questions than answers, and serves as its undesignated epilogue.

Is the narrator addressing the reader directly when he says: "Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand"? Or is that second-person pronoun directed at the narrator himself, like a rhetorical question? Or is there an intentional conflation of narrator and reader and even ghosts? The man who remembered the trout in the early mountain section of the novel is dead. Yet you, the reader, cannot help associating the trout here with those remembered trout. They are as iconic as Hemingway's trout, or more so, both early in the novel and intensely so now in this echoing epilogic vision of them, shared in the foreground between the complicit narrator and the willing reader and in the background with Hemingway and the dead father.

Native brook trout (technically a char, salvelinus fontinalis) are as perfect a species as exists in nature, yet they are delicate and susceptible to the effects of any kind of pollution. McCarthy uses them to stand for all the particular natural miracles that have been destroyed by whatever cataclysm has occurred: "Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming." These miracle trout of becoming are at once real (the light wavy markings on the brook trout's dorsal area are called vermiculations) and intricately evolved, and they return us to once - what is now, from the current point of view of this narrator-after-the-fact, in illo tempore - to our as yet undestroyed world where the brookies still wimple and swim, while not releasing us from the recorded destruction in the novel: "Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again." We are returned, briefly and ever so hypothetically, to the irreversibly fragile pristine mountain setting - a thing which could not be put back - of the sacred trout for the ultimate, possibly guilt-laden, possibly not, nostalgic and mystical pronouncement: "In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery" (286-87).

[Anonymous No.21643952]

>>21643946
In the deep mountain hollows and coves where the trout once lived, emblematic of the entire natural world, all of nature was older than man and all of it, everything, hummed with the essence of life. It is no coincidence that the final word is 'mystery.' All of Cormac McCarthy's work hums with mystery, and at the end of The Road, or more precisely at the end of the epilogue of The Road, we are left with exactly that - with mystery - because McCarthy knows, as Federico Garcia Lorca said, that "Only mystery makes us live. Only mystery" (III,
1038). Read the final paragraph - this exquisite epilogue - of The Road as agnostic or Gnostic, call it deist or pantheist. Read it any way you want. It is ultimately - polished and muscular and torsional - beyond any category and imbued with its own inextinguishable sense of mystery.

[Anonymous No.21644113]

Weird responses in this thread, the point of The Road is the unending struggle to live, life's reistance and triumph against extinction. You have read very carelessly.

[Anonymous No.21644527]

>>21644113
I thought it was about how the true road was the friends we made along the way?

[Anonymous No.21644561]

>>21635803
Maybe a 7/10. I give it a C. 2.5/4 stars if it were a movie. It has no staying power, I never found myself thinking about it afterward. It has embarassingly overwritten prose throughout. I read it the same day as The Stranger and that completely overshadowed this.

[Anonymous No.21644582]

>>21644561
>The Road
>overwritten prose
You have to be retarded.

[Anonymous No.21644586]

>>21644582
I'm not going to open it and start quoting the absolutely retarded bits.

[Anonymous No.21644603]

>>21644586
Yeah because you can't

[Anonymous No.21644626]

I want to dive into McCarthy's works. I have heard there are overarching narrative themes amongst his books. What books should I read, and in what order? Does it matter?

[Anonymous No.21644629]

>>21644586
>bits are the whole book
You have to be retarded.

[Anonymous No.21644639]

>>21644626
Just be yourself

[Anonymous No.21644682]

>>21644561
>if it were a movie
It exists.

[Anonymous No.21644840]

i just finished it. it was good, and yeah, it gets the juices flowing as a dad but a few gripes:
1) the world has been ending for almost 10 years now but the man still finds apples that are edible in an orchard?
2) i got the impression from reading it that cormac had difficulty putting the son in danger because of course, he represents cormac's own son. in the first 50 pages the child will come as close to danger as he ever will when a roadrat puts a knife to his throat. after that he will encounter many roadside atrocities but never again will he come as close to danger again.
3)i wouldn't quite call the ending "tacked-on" but he could have let the ending breath a bit. as soon as the father dies the child starves for 3 days and then that other guy shows up and he's saved, the end.

[Anonymous No.21644907]

I liked it, though it was the first big boy book I ever read that got me into reading and its been years. I'll have to reread it one of the days

[Anonymous No.21644977]

>>21634950
What's your interpretation of the ending anon? I thought they were grooming the kid to be a part of their gang,but I might have to reread that part.

[Anonymous No.21644980]

>>21635862
>

[Anonymous No.21645053]

>>21644113
And also that a combination of virtue, hope and instinct will guide you through whatever you may face, instinct in this case being the one of a father protecting his offspring (the father becomes like a special ops dude for his child while the roadagents will become slack after supplying their senses with evil pleasures), virtue in his struggle to not end both their lives to avoid suffering but in the end staving off the fear with hope and willpower. Without hope it would've been virtuous to shoot his kid and hang himself.

>>21644840
1) I thought that it meant that apples thrive in North America so well that they'd continue their lifecycle even after whatever
2) Very true, a good observation. I had the same idea but in broader strokes; the first quarter is easily the most brutal for the reader to such a degree that it almost ruins the rest with expectations and your newfound tolerance for atrocity.
3) 100% agreed.

>>21644977
I got the spooks in the end when I tried reading into it as if the man coming to rescue the boy was just lying and it does tease that a bit but then ultimately ends with a clear positive note.

[Anonymous No.21645295]

>>21634986
is this a jojos reference?

[Anonymous No.21645406]

>>21644977
there's nothing mysterious about it. he's adopted into a family that has their shit together better than his dad did. the end.

[Anonymous No.21645439]

>>21645406
But we don't know if he's lying. He even says so himself. It's just something the kid has to trust in whether or not it's good.

[Anonymous No.21645643]

>>21645439
it's obvious when he's introduced to his wife that it wasn't a lie, but like the other poster said the text says "sometimeS she would try to talk to him about God". TIMES, PLURAL. he didn't get raped or eaten come the fuck on

[Anonymous No.21645778]

>>21644629
>throughout means every page
Any somewhat homogeneous distribution means something is spread throughout esl. Throughout has no density measurement.

[Anonymous No.21645824]

I have no father and I cried by the end of the book.

[Anonymous No.21646082]

>>21645824
This. I could barely stop myself from weeping each time the boy says he's scared.

Wonder how different my life would've been with a father. Oh well; one roll.

[Anonymous No.21646373]

>>21645824
>>21646082
I have a father and he moved 2000 miles away when I was 9 and started a new family so I couldn't create an idealistic oneitis dad-image in my head to mourn.

[Anonymous No.21646411]

>>21645824
>>21646082
>>21646373
Your true father is God.

[Anonymous No.21646417]

>>21646411
I hope.

[Anonymous No.21646486]

>>21643832
In that case wouldn’t just america be fucked and the old world would be mostly fine?

[Anonymous No.21647055]

>>21646486
You would think there would be some sort of missionary or refugee effort from the other first world countries if it was just America, but there's no one.

[Anonymous No.21647075]

>>21634950
I read it and it felt trite and overrated.

[Anonymous No.21647152]

>>21645778
Only an ESL would consider this book overwritten when it is the exact opposite of it. Stop embarrassing yourself.

[Anonymous No.21647210]

>>21647152
Ok stan

[Anonymous No.21647247]

>>21643952
please just link your diatribe next time instead of taking up my screen's space

[Anonymous No.21647252]

>>21644626
I liked no country for old men, blood meridian, some of all the pretty horses, the road, and the sunset limited. his other stuff isn't for me. start with what you've heard of (no country, blood meridian etc) and go from there.

[Anonymous No.21647267]

>>21644561
>It has embarassingly overwritten prose throughout.

cringe.
>Can't even spell embarrassing
>criticizes "overwritten" prose

[Anonymous No.21647282]

>>21647267
I had no idea people liked this little book so much. I don't see why it was very forgettable other than the over the top gay sounding descriptions.

[Anonymous No.21647286]

>>21644840
>but never again will he come as close to danger again.

Yeah he does, when the family comes home and the Dad gives him the gun and tells him to shoot himself.

[Anonymous No.21647290]

>>21647247
Okay goy

[Anonymous No.21647295]

>>21647282
You're immature, that's all. You don't even know what over the top description means, the description in The Road, is sparse. It's unique writing, but it's the opposite of overwritten.

[Anonymous No.21647320]

>>21647295
It really isn't.

[Anonymous No.21647386]

>>21647320
>They ate slowly out of bone china bowls, sitting at opposite sides of the table with a single candle burning between them. The pistol lying to hand like another dining implement. The warming house creaked and groaned. Like a thing being called out of long hibernation. The boy nodded over his bowl and his spoon clattered to the floor. The man rose and came around and carried him to the hearth and put him down in the sheets and covered him with the blankets. He must have gone back to the table because he woke in the night lying there with his face in his crossed arms. It was cold in the room and outside the wind was blowing. The windows rattled softly in their frames. The candle had burned out and the fire was down to coals. He rose and built back the fire and sat beside the boy and pulled the blankets over him and brushed back his filthy hair. I think maybe they are watching, he said. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back.
This passage is one of the more elaborate ones. Do you really think this is overwritten? How and why? I don't think that's overwritten even compared to The Stranger.

[Anonymous No.21647545]

>>21647386
> I think maybe they are watching, he said. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back.
..huh?

[Anonymous No.21647562]

>>21634950
Good book for sure, my least favorite of his I've read so far though. I still have six more of his books to read

[Anonymous No.21647579]

>>21635242
did you not finish the book or forget the ending

[Anonymous No.21647605]

>>21647545
The father is responding to something a character said previously in the book.

[Anonymous No.21647613]

>>21647579
The ending is literally
>Once there were....in the streams in the mountains
It is a remembrance of the past, not something that signals that the world heals.

[Anonymous No.21647674]

>>21647613
the ending encourages naive hope even in the face of hopelessness. it is that childlike hope that saves the child. it also seems to imply the last good men on earth are protected under divine providence. "carrying the fire" evokes the hearth fire of the greeks in keeping your ancestors alive and prospering long after their death. it is a story of hoping long after all hope is lost. the trout is a symbol of life's fragility but also a reminder that life will find some hidden corner to persist and thrive.

[Anonymous No.21647979]

>>21647674
Finally, someone who got the ending.

[Anonymous No.21648354]

>>21646373
This is actually why I "didn't have" mine, except the divorce was entirely pursued by my mother, quite unjustly.

[Anonymous No.21648391]

>>21645778
If The Road is "overwritten prose" I suppose you consider the Bible to be overwritten as well?

[Anonymous No.21648502]

>>21647386
>like another dining implement
>like a being called out of long hibernation

[Anonymous No.21648537]

>>21648502
>using similes is overwriting

[Anonymous No.21648647]

>>21648502
It takes a special kind of smooth brain to not be able to connect the dots between a post-apocalyptic setting, its consequences and the allusion behind "long hibernation"? A six year old would be able to understand this.

[Anonymous No.21648888]

>>21648537
>similies to abstractions
>it's like a category of objects

[Anonymous No.21648899]

>>21648647
>like a being coming out of hibernation
Retarded. It would be like saying a hungry man eating is like a transportation module being filled with combustable material.

[Anonymous No.21648920]

>>21648899
Sorry, man. I'm not sarcastic when I claim that it greatly saddens me just how umbilical you are.

[Anonymous No.21648988]

>>21647386
I just read Proust before The Road so I laugh at any notion of MCCarthy “over writing” bitch please

[Anonymous No.21649085]

>>21648920
I guarantee you that if this mediocre genre fiction came true I would eat you and you would die immediately.

[Anonymous No.21649090]

>>21643952
Thanks for posting

[Anonymous No.21649183]

>>21648899
It's not like that at all because that simile makes sense and yours looks like a nonsequitur shat out by a fool which is exactly what is.

[Anonymous No.21649210]

>>21648899
They made camp in a long abandoned house. The world is covered in ash and very cold. They lit a fire inside the house to keep themselves warm. If you have ever touched grass you would know what a wooden house would do then. It starts creaking as frozen wood thaws.

That is what is meant by "coming out of hibernation".

You are not retarded for dissenting, but for opening your mouth without ever having read the book.

[Anonymous No.21649248]

>>21649210
It's not just that. A house is an object build by and for someone but it comes out of hibernation in a cold world in which the reason for its existence is not present, or scarce. Inanimate but waiting to fulfill its purpose it turns into more than just a house; that's why the simile is so important as it is not just so in meaning but in being.

[Anonymous No.21649371]

I had no idea Kerouac was so popular around here

[Anonymous No.21649390]

>>21649248
True. The kindling of the fire within the house also reckons to the then extinct familial tradition within the fictive setting. It's as if the house is 'rising from its slumber to assume its role'. To provide security to the family.
I wonder if McCarthy has sneaked in a Heidegger reference here. He is very familiar and his use of similes in Blood meridian reminded me of dasein.

[Anonymous No.21649451]

>>21649390
You got me interested, spill the beans! Got BM coming in the mail.

[Anonymous No.21649523]

>>21649390
very good analysis. fire in general is a massive theme in the book, resembling the beauty of life, like love and family, "carrying the fire", etc. so this is a cool analysis i didnt pick up on. i appreciate you bringing this up anon

[Anonymous No.21649583]

>>21649451
I don't have any academic source to back it up nor am I the biggest Heidegger scholar around, but here goes nothing:

Heidegger's theory of Dasein describes how objects become understood to us aka how they "get" their being. A table is not a table because it has one flat plane and 3-4 legs as support, but it's daily day to day interaction with Dasein gives it its being. This knowledge is integrated automatically as background information and is not a conscious process. This is how objects take their being. Now, Heidegger also believed that poetic language can reveal aspects of Dasein that are usually hidden because it renders beings/objects in a different light for Dasein (I am using it as a noun but it isn't). Language is intrinsically tied with Dasein. Naming is the second step for Dasein to cognize objects as individual beings.

It is in the 2nd one that I see resemblance to Blood Meridian. The middle of the novel (nearly 200 pages) are almost exclusively landscape descriptions and natural imagery. But McCarthy's use of Similes and figurative language constantly casts 'known' objects (usually features of geology with specific names) in almost alien, sometimes transcendent light. They become highly suggestive. This is possibly how language imbues symbols onto objects and is the basis of symbolism. But symbols in Blood meridian are unresolved. Images can imply any interpretation from any school of thought, even contradictory ones to the meaning of these scenes. This is what makes the task of interpreting the novel definitively, impossible. McCarthy's imagery is very vivid but also very associative and it seems to not observe a singular narrative line along which he might have wished to string his descriptions.
I would say that this may have been a function of poetic language than anything deliberate on McCarthy's part but for this one excerpt:
>their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
McCarthy clearly knows what his use of language is doing to the world/story he is describing. It is even acknowledged within the book by the narrator. The image of Judge and the fool travelling through the desert becomes suggestive, metaphorical such that readers will pay greater attention to the suggested symbols (King lear and his fool for one) than the literal objects themselves (the 7 foot albino judge and the shit-eating drooling fool). And in typical McCarthy fashion the suggested metaphor doesn't slot into any of the many interpretations of the novel.

[Anonymous No.21649589]

>>21649583
McCarthy's purpose here seems to show how language functions on the most fundamental level because finally all words are "metaphors" for their referrents. This is why the middle of the book is nothing but description with no real "narrative" behind them. It is an examination of the very thing that is being used to examine. But it is oblique, or should I say so obvious that most people never get it.

Additionally, I think Holden may also be a cheeky homage to Heidegger. He is also a master of language, a philosopher and speaks in the same convoluted but self aware way that Heidegger does in Being and Time. Both seem to be aware that some people will just label them sophists for the use of their kind of language. But what they are saying cannot be expressed in anyway else. If being and all that can be said about it depends on language, then changing the language also changes what is being said even if only in small ways. In philosophy/logic these small changes may make or break an argument.

[Anonymous No.21649610]

>>21649589
>oblique, or so obvious that most people never get it
hehe i caught it as i was reading it. there was a lack of "things happening" but the description, of the characters and the setting, is so strong that there is always suspense. it gets across the constant state of fear the characters are in. it perfectly captures the feeling of being a parent, especially a new one, how at all times you're anticipating some kind of catastrophe, watching out for it and being ready to act if it does happen.

[Anonymous No.21649656]

>>21649583
>>21649589
Thanks for taking the time fren. Looking forward to reading BM even more now.

[Anonymous No.21649702]

>>21649610
I can ramble on more. It is an exceptionally rich work. All his work is very rich and rigorous. McCarthy, like Melville, down the line might end up being seen as a philosopher or a visionary. But McCarthy might hold up better to rational/logic analysis because he seems to acknowledge the unreality of transcendence.

One thing I wished to add was that this figurative language, the suggestion in it, the suspense as you call it, might be McCarthy's way of implying presence of gnosis. The language constantly flirts with some revelation hidden in the reality of the world as it vividly describes the world. That it never comes might be seen as McCarthy's comment, but what to make of the epilogue then?

Buddha spent years meditating to achieve enlightenment, but what was the medium of such enlightenment? Language. All the great philosophers with great insights into the nature of being/world came to their final understanding when they finally had the words to express those insights. The permutation of words can deliver "gnosis", if there is one to deliver. That's what Blood meridian seems to be trying, but mediated through the desert and the glanton gang and the Judge. It sounds ridiculous but the title is an homage to Jacob Boehme, who also has one epigraph at the beginning of the book, and Boehme started writing visionary books about art, creativity, philosophy etc. after witnessing the sun reflected off a pewter dish. The absurdity of the book's meditation is also an homage to the absurdity of Boehme's artistic inspiration. I wonder if the desert did the same to McCarthy as the sun did to Boehme.

It is an analytical book as much as it is an aesthetic novel. The aesthetic is intrinsically tied to the analytics.

[Anonymous No.21649721]

>>21649702
analytic philosophy is gay as fuck but the way you described this is cool

[Anonymous No.21649757]

>>21649721
I don't necessarily mean analytic philosophy. These demarcations are really blurry imo. I think Heidegger is very rigorous but he isn't considered an analytic philosopher. Wittgenstein though is. They are different with different concerns, but if you stck with semantics then I never understood the reasoning behind this classification.

[Anonymous No.21649814]

>>21649656
You won't be disappointed. I've read some people including my old english prof read through the book w a map to follow their path across the country, haven't personally done it but sure it gives a lot of perspective

[Anonymous No.21649831]

>>21649814
I've been thinking about getting a physical companion but maybe I'll just use the uni printer to get a wordlist for it.

[Anonymous No.21650698]

>>21634950
>58,000 words
>about as edgy as a Tool song
>extremely simple theme
>can be read in one day
>$20
Personally I felt ripped off.

[Anonymous No.21651136]

>>21650698
>edgy
Are you 19 bro?
>simple themes
You likely missed all the complex ones.

[Anonymous No.21651140]

>>21634950
>It's genuinely the most difficult book I've ever had to read (because of the content).
The book is well-written, but the content is pretty standard for post-apocalyptic stuff. Even normieshit like The Walking Dead goes farther in that regard.

[Anonymous No.21651146]

>>21651136
i rolled my eyes at the baby on the spit desu. why the fuck would a woman keep a baby in her if she was starving just to eat it? that would probably double her needed calories. more likely she would just get a coat hanger abortion instead. the logistics of it make no sense, it's just cheap shock value.

[Anonymous No.21651148]

>>21649721
I will never understand why you guys hate analytic so much

[Anonymous No.21651167]

>>21651146
It's still only one scene. Maybe one more in the cellar. That's about it though.

[Anonymous No.21651175]

>>21651140
OP did not mean gore or brutality. It's emotionally draining. Most of the book doesn't even focus upon most of the trappings of post-apoc fiction. The closest thing it does is cannibalism and cannibalistic groups.

[Anonymous No.21651178]

>>21651136
Whoa life is suffering but you have to keep going anyway and pass the torch to the younger generation it's so complex whoa as long as you suffer for somebody else even in memory it makes it bearable

[Anonymous No.21651185]

>>21651175
Wow he kept up bleak tension for a whole 60k words that must have been really hard in a post apocalyptic setting

[Anonymous No.21651231]

>>21651178
>>21651185
>whoa

[Anonymous No.21651235]

>>21651231
>115 pages of material
>that will be $20 plus tip please
Stans will defend this.

[Anonymous No.21651245]

>>21651235
The book is 17 years old, where the hell did you get it for 20 dollars from?

[Anonymous No.21651249]

>>21651245
The msrp.

[Anonymous No.21651262]

>>21651249
My bad it is $17 list price for 115 pages of material. That's only about $0.15 per page.

[Anonymous No.21651532]

>>21647545
Bro didn't even read the book :skull:

[Anonymous No.21653047]

Bumping based thread

[Anonymous No.21654663]

>>21634950
what do you think the epilogue meant?

[Anonymous No.21655429]

>>21634950
So how does it make you feel? You’re on a literature board, you should type up a little something to accompany your thread.

[Anonymous No.21655445]

>>21654663
See>>21643946 and >>21643952

[Anonymous No.21656850]

>>21644626
Start with no country for old men, then road, then blood meridian. Then try outer dark, child of god and the orchard keeper. If you got this far you might as well try the border trilogy. If you get through those three then you are ready for Suttree.

[Anonymous No.21657018]

>>21634986
How is that an antithesis?

[Anonymous No.21657137]

>>21634950
It's written poorly. The definition of purple prose

[Anonymous No.21657178]

>>21657137
You are retarded. If this is purple prose then what is sparse prose?

[Anonymous No.21657676]

Better post apocalypse books
>A canticle for leibowitz
>alas Babylon
>I am legend
Road is overrated.

[Anonymous No.21657769]

>>21657676
The Road is post-apoc only in setting and frame. It's post-apoc in the same way Waiting for Godot is post-apoc. Its intentions are completely different from something like Canticle for Lebowitz.

[Anonymous No.21657792]

>>21657769
Setting is important in stories
It steals the genres setting yet seeks to subvert the genre at the same time (we don't know what caused the world to go down hill, the place they are going to is no better than anywhere else, etc).

Stealing a setting only to deconstruct it is a waste of paper and should be treated as such

[Anonymous No.21657838]

>>21657792
I am getting the feeling that you haven't even read the book.
>we don't know what caused the world to go down hill, the place they are going to is no better than anywhere else
That's not deconstruction, just realism. The book is focalized through the father and Son and what sent the world to shit is inconsequential to them. Besides, The Road is barely a story. Father and son move southwards. That's the entire plot.

The Road is more about the impressions of a dead world. James wood had it right, the main problem that the book tackles is imaginative; how a dead world would feel like, look like. Rest comes after. The basic premise isn't too different from Blood Meridian which seems bent on rendering the vividness and alieness of Desert Landscapes more than making some point about its genre or American history. We read the book because of its prose and vividness of its various anecdotes, not for some grandplot unfolding in some end of the world scenario.

[Anonymous No.21658741]

>>21657838
I have read the book.
The prose did not do much for me. I did not find Mccarthys book to be superior to the previously mentioned works as a result of his prose at any rate. It could not make up for the poor story

If the world were to end and you had been on "the road" you would be aware of how it ended, or at the very least no doubt heard others say what was up and youd likely have been aware of events leading up to it (tension between nations prior to a nuclear war, strange readings from the sun prior to a deadly solar flair, reports regarding climate change, etc). Sadly this cause is a glaring plot hole throughout the book. One which Mccarthy never addresses and seems to want to avoid because doing so would require him to go beyond his simply describing the landscape. He shows severe shallowness in doing so, which again, makes it inferior to actual genre works

[Anonymous No.21658804]

>>21658741
because it has nothing to do with the point of the book. it makes no difference how it ended.
are you pretending to be stupid?

[Anonymous No.21658970]

>>21658804
>he thinks the setting has nothing to do with the story
And yet you call me stupid

[Anonymous No.21659798]

>>21658741
>If the world were to end and you had been on "the road" you would be aware of how it ended, or at the very least no doubt heard others say what was up and youd likely have been aware of events leading up to it
Even if the answer to that is yes, why do you think this was important to be brought up in the book? Maybe the father and his son have already talked about this in one of the 10 years they been travelling. Your criticism is not of some real mistake on the book's part but because of your dissatisfaction at subverting a cliche. Let's say there was a line telling the reader what it was that caused the apocalypse, is the book suddenly better now?

[Anonymous No.21660829]

/// The drug is very effective - the only snag is that it cannot be produced in large quantities /// People with devious intentions always manage to find loopholes in legislation /// The car gave a sudden judder, then stopped dead /// She might live to rue this impetuous decision /// For now, foreign companies should tread carefully and onshore user data when possible /// /// It's like one of those tinkly bells that you get with Buddhism or one of those religions, a little dry bell /// We refute this scurrilous allegation /// Criminy, what is this world coming to? /// We could hear the sergeant bellowing orders to his troops /// Just plunk your stuff down on any old desk /// He let out a holler as he fell /// The crates were unloaded onto the wharf /// Whence does Parliament derive this power? /// There was no warrant for such behavior /// Now the last of these three objectives was obviously a pipe dream /// Neath his calm surface there was seething anger /// From what I was able to glean, the news isn't good /// The drug has a litany of possible side effects /// Smaller quilts for single beds are exempt from tax /// He has long felt that Ray was set up, that he was a patsy /// I showed up giddy with anticipation, brimming with questions /// To use the vernacular of the period, Peter was square /// As a rule, monocles were a male accessory: If in need of an aid to vision, a woman would use spectacles or a lorgnette, a pair of glasses on a handle /// Both men and women have cowlicks, which can be covered by longer hair so the whorl is not visible /// A yearning for life has turned into disenchantment and ennui /// He denies making off-color remarks about his colleagues /// I could hear the champagne fizz as he poured it into my glass /// In all human affairs, there is virtue in a successor's not being a precise simulacrum of the predecessor whom he or she follows /// The country's criminal and civil courts were creaking at the seams in spite of efforts to shore them up /// The boat was hit by a squall north of the island /// If you need help, just call on Mike. He can come at the drop of a hat ///