Limited Pallette

‘Avoiding emotional language and keeping it simple makes the narrative all the more emotionally engaging.’

McCarthy’s avoidance of elaborative and emotional imagery creates a chilling result. The simplicity screams volumes, where complex, emotive language would only create a whisper. Although it may take perseverance to fully give yourself McCarthy’s style, when you do, the novel is an emotionally shattering piece of work.  

The simplistic style creating engagement is most evident in the key events of the novel. For example when the boy witnesses the baby on the spit, what he has seen and how he reacts McCarthy expresses in just four lines, just 41 words. This seems an awfully short section to portray something so gruesome and haunting; it is almost as if it is normal. But keeping it so blunt emotion is drawn out of the reader in so many more ways than if it was ‘fussy’. It creates a sense of shock; because of the blandness the reader doesn’t instantly process what he boy has seen, but when it sets in the realisation is disgusting. Leading on to think that something as shocking as seeing a ‘charred human infant headless and gutted…on a spit’ is a normality in the world in which the man and boy exist. This thought is heart-breaking, haunting and sickening. And conjures up questions to the man’s morality, the boy’s future and what is to come.  All of these questions and emotions McCarthy manages to draw out in just 41 words.

This same kind of bluntness is repeated in the death of the father, ‘….he woke in the morning his father was cold and stiff. He sat there a long time weeping and then he got up and walked out through the wood to the road.’ Once again the whole passage is completed in just 6 lines. The boys acceptance to the situation is heart-breaking, initial thoughts are that he doesn’t care but the reader knows that’s not true, he is only doing what his father has taught him. Don’t dwell on the past and his obedience to his father even in death is inspiring.

The reader almost wants lengthy, finely detailed, emotional passages, to give them some kind of normality and reference to novels they have read before. But by refraining from doing this McCarthy creates even more unease. And yes due to this lack of obvious emotion, relationships between the characters and reader are harder to form, but after a period of time they are carved deeper than they would be otherwise. The reader starts to care and want protection for the man and the boy, as what is come next for them to have to deal with is unknown.

The phases less is more could be more apt here.