A Limited Palette

Cormac McCarthy writes with a limited palette in The Road, like a painter choosing a restricted range of colours. Certain adjectives crop up repeatedly, for instance, ‘gray’ and ‘ashen’. The dialogue often follows a similar pattern, ending with the father asking the boy if he’s ‘okay’ and the boy responding ‘okay.’ The sentence structures are also often highly repetitive, with simple and compound sentences being used rather than complex ones.
Here are some possible literary analyses of why this limited palette might have been chosen by the writer.


1. Choose those you most agree with and find examples from the text to illustrate the analysis being made.

1. The limited linguistic palette and repetitive techniques echo the monotony of the post-apocalyptic world that is described.
   
2. The repetitive language echoes the idea of being on a road, constantly travelling.
   
3. The death of everything living – plants, trees, creatures and most other human beings – is evoked through the bleakness and ‘deadness’ of the language.
   
4. There is a powerfully poetic effect in the simplicity of the language. By avoiding rhetorical flourishes and elaborate language the writer makes a stronger impact.
   
5. The pared down language of the narrative reflects the pared down life the characters have to live – essentials only.
   
6. Avoiding emotional language and keeping it simple makes the narrative all the more emotionally engaging.
   
7. The limited palette makes the story more universal, a fable for all time, rather than pinning it down with lots of elaborate details describing specific places.
   
8. There’s something rather dulling about the style that makes it hard to read and difficult to distinguish one part of the book from the next. All the events seem to merge together.
   
9. Lack of hyperbolic language highlights the extremity of the situation.
   

A Limited Palette?


It’s easy to oversimplify when talking about a writer’s style and although Cormac McCarthy is known for the spareness of his prose, there are also moments of rich lyricism in The Road.

1. Have a look again at the opening page of the novel, where the man is described waking from a dream. Phrases like the following are full of figurative language and poetic vocabulary: ‘Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast.’ Dreams and moments of waking seem to be evoked in this more lush language.
   
2. Find other examples of this in the novel.
   
3. Can you think of other instances where the language is of a different kind? Find examples and explain what the qualities of the language are and why you think language is being used in this way.
   
4. Look again at the literary analysis statements above. Either re-write one of these analytical statements or draft your own to reflect your discoveries about the variations in McCarthy’s prose style.