Aspects of Narrative – P1-28

Beginnings

P1 – Begin the man and boy’s story straight away

P11 – Beginning of the story of the man’s childhood – ‘his uncle’s farm’

P24 – Explore the man’s childhood house

P17 – Beginning of the story of the man’s wife – ‘his pale bride’ ‘Pale’ here could represent that she is now dead

P28 – Refugees/other people’s story begins as they are described in the past tense – ‘In those first years’ this description of them ‘sitting in their rags’ contrasts to the people we encounter later in the novel that are more proactive, even if they are more barbaric.

Endings

P10 – End of man’s faith in God – ‘Damn you eternally’. There are references to God throughout the novel, but I think that the man uses God as a scapegoat for everything that has happened as a mechanism for staying sane, therefore he has lost his faith, but not his belief for the simple reason that he needs to blame someone for all the bad things that have happened so he doesn’t lose his sanity.

P20 – The end of humanity – ‘no sign of life’

P28 – End of time – ‘ever is no time at all’ there is an ending of time because the recording of time is no longer necessary in this new world were all that matters is surviving another day.

P28 – the man wonders if he would be able to end the boy’s life.

Characterisation

P4 – there is a strong bond between the man and boy which is present from the start.  This bond keeps the man strong and allows him to have the will to keep going. - ‘each the other’s world entire’ this shows the isolation of the characters and that all they have is each other.

P9 – there is a sense of loneliness and isolation within the characters through their conversation – ‘Okay what?

Nothing. Just Okay.

Go to sleep.

Okay.’

This simple conversation also gives the reader a sense of detachment between the characters due to the minimalistic choice of vocabulary and the way that they only say the essential and nothing more.

P10 – we see the internal suffering of the man through the way he talks to God; ‘will I see you at last?’

P28 – the characterisation of the refugees as having given up and simply waiting for death – ‘sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators.’

Settings

P1 – The setting of the entire novel is summed up in a metaphor on the first page; ‘Pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and cast among the inward parts of some granitic beast’  The Pilgrims are the man and boy and the granitic beast is the world.  The way that the pilgrims are described to have been ‘cast among the inward parts’ of the beast could show that the world has been turned inside out for the man and boy, in other words it is completely different and unrecognisable as the world which we live in.

P2 – the setting of the road is described as ‘Barren, silent, godless.’  This description gives us an insight to what kind of experience this novel will give the reader; a bleak and depressing one.  The use of the word ‘godless’ tells us that the man and boy will have hell-like experiences through the novel.

P4-5 – A gas station is described and from this description we see that this is a world which was once like ours, but has changed dramatically for reasons unknown to the reader.  This is shown through the way that the pumps were ‘standing with their hoses oddly still in place’.  This shows that the normal for us as readers has become abnormal for the characters.

P11 – When the man remembers his uncle’s farm everything is warm and colourful; ‘yellow leaves’ ‘manila rope’ this is a contrast to the world in which the man and boy live now and shows that the man’s memories taunt him.

P14 – The ‘blackness’ of the world around them at night is described.  – The word ‘blackness is repeated and ‘blackened is used.  It is also described as ‘impenetrable’ which shows that the darkness is absolute and also contrasts to the world we know because it is never totally dark outside.

P22 – the supermarket – the fact that the ‘softdrink machines’ had been raided but no-one had took the ‘coins everywhere in the ash’ shows that peoples priorities have changed in this new world and currency doesn’t matter anymore.

P24-26 – the man’s childhood house – ‘peeling wooden clapboards’, ‘rotted screening’, ‘pine panelling was gone’, ‘the mantle...that had held stockings forty years ago’, ‘damp plaster’ – these descriptions show that a long time has passed since anyone has lived here and the fact that the man is reminiscent of his childhood makes the scene more depressing as we get an insight to how this house used to be.

Destination

P2 – the destination of the man and boy is made clear from the start – ‘they were moving south’ this is the man and boy’s goal and as the novel progresses we as readers are always aware of this destination too.

P4 – the man and boy always return to the road throughout the novel and this habit starts at the very beginning of the novel – ‘An hour later they were on the road.’

Journey

P1 – the idea of a journey is present from the start when McCarthy likens the man and boy to ‘pilgrims’.

P1-28 – The man and boy are constantly on a journey through the novel and this is clear from the opening as even in this short section of the novel the setting is constantly changing and even when the man and boy reach a house or similar they continue to move and explore the house, only stopping at night for sleep.  This gives an impression of endless journey.

Time

P1 – the first reference to time is mentioned in the first paragraph of the novel – ‘the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease’ to show that time is endless and morphing into one continuous thread with no definitions such as hours or minutes.

P10 – Time through the novel is often split into day and night - ‘he woke before dawn and watched the gray day break’ this shows that unlike us the people of this world use natural time markers, like the rising and setting of the sun to mark time of day, which is more primal and so shows that the people in the novel have had to revert to methods used by our distant ancestors as the desolate and destroyed world does not accommodate for modern ways of living.

Time passage in this section, like in the rest of the novel is not even.  Where one paragraph can deal with a single moment in time, the next can move through a few days.  This uneven passage of time shows the uneven way which the man and boy live.  The novel also features no chapters which shows that time stands still for no-one and the man and boys lives flow and never stop, just like the novel.