1. What authors or genres of writing are cited as influencing McCarthy’s writing style?
Mark Twain
William Faulkner
The author of NYT’s article on All the Pretty Horses compares McCarthy to Faulkner and Twain for their distinctive writing styles. McCarthy’s prose style effectively uses a series of run-on sentences for elaborate descriptions of vast landscapes, kind of like Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness technique. His lack of use of quotation marks and apostrophies in dialogue helps the reader to follow a stream of conversation, just like in a real life conversation.
2. How does McCarthy treat human characters in his story as opposed to landscape and animals like horses?
In his sleep he could hear the horses stepping among the rocks and he could hear them drink from the shallow pools in the dark where the rocks lay smooth and rectilinear as the stones of ancient ruins and the water from their muzzles dripped and rang like water dripping in a well and in his sleep he dreamt of horses and the horses in his dream moved gravely among the tilted stones like horses come upon an antique site where some ordering of the world had failed and if anything had been written on the stones the weathers had taken it away again and the horses were wary and moved with great circumspection carrying in their blood as they did the recollection of this and other places where horses once had been and would be again. Finally what he saw in his dream was that the order in the horse’s heart was more durable for it was written in a place where no rain could erase it.
Interestingly, McCarthy treats landscape and animals, especially horses, as central to his fiction, whereas human and human thought alone are more secondary. A small excerpt from All the Pretty Horses presented in the article shows that even while sleeping, John Grady Cole thinks about the horse’s every little movement and not much about the character’s thoughts are discussed. Throughout the novel, there are extensive descriptions about nature around John Grady, and to begin with, John Grady would lose meaning in life without horses. McCarthy emphasizes the interaction between the environment, animals and humans, not just between humans.
3. What type of dialogue does the article state McCarthy uses?
As mentioned above, McCarthy mainly uses realistic dialogue. To portray the carelessly succinct and rustic conversations of Southerners, McCarthy uses short, coming and going dialogue, commonly using words like “aint” and “yessir.” The article doesn’t extensively talk about the McCarthy’s dialogue style.
4. What is notable about his diction (word choice)?
McCarthy is creative and eclectic in that he draws his diction and phrasing from all over the evolutionary history of English. Some words he chose are so strange and unheard of today that they seem like new words. According to the article, All the Pretty Horses is one of the more approachable of his books because of his less archaic word choice. He occasionally uses Spanish dialect, which the reader may not understand, but add to the meaning and the reality of the text.
