William Faulkner used contractions without apostrophes.
and where is he now, huh?
dead. that's where.
Well, yes and no. I find this sort of statement implies to me that you can only fiddle with what someone might consider nonstandard after you've proven yourself a "good writer" which I disagree with, and the idea that "the rest of us" just aren't good enough to ignore all the blah blah about adverbs or whatever doesn't sit well with me.
...I thought, after reading it, than he'd left out the punctuation because doing so mirrored the world of his mc: sparse, immediate, no time for indulgences...
To address tylermarab1987's original question, here's a link where McCarthy explains his use of punctuation.
http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/cormac-mccarthys-punctuation-rules.html
For me, the best prose is like a great painting. The prose itself is like the brush strokes. I don't want to see those. I just want to see the final product: the painting itself. If I see your brush strokes, it reminds me that I'm looking at a painting.
If I'm thinking about your prose, I'm not immersed in the story. For me, the best prose is like a great painting. The prose itself is like the brush strokes. I don't want to see those. I just want to see the final product: the painting itself. If I see your brush strokes, it reminds me that I'm looking at a painting.
Throughout this entire thread I've seen tossing opinion as fact, implications of 'not getting it' and 'his brilliance isn't hampered by convention' and 'people are just mad because he's doing it and they're not' and 'he's lazy' and 'he thinks he's too good for rules' and 'he's pretentious'. I'm sure someone even accused him of being ugly, I can't say for certain because my eyes start to cross with all this.
If you give a sentence that is supposed to be an example of any author's good writing and someone else doesn't find your example all that compelling?
Either re-examine your choice or give a larger sample size. But to give one sentence, that is already out of context, have someone say 'eh, doesn't do much for me, I'll pass' and then wave your arms that you can't read a sentence out of context to judge something...well, then don't give a sentence that is out of context as an example of his good writing?
For myself, I don't want to read The Road because I have heard about the bleak crapsack world he presents. I don't care how beautifully it's written, I don't read to ugly cry and my research tells me that is what will happen.
Oh, I probably need to add an emoticon there, don't I?
That's fair enough, though that would be an indication of the appeal of the story and not the style.
It's not like he's the only writer who does this. William Faulkner used contractions without apostrophes. Other writers have eschewed quotation marks too; in his Oprah interview McCarthy cites a Civil War novel (whose title I cannot remember offhand) as the first he read without quotation marks.
There's also Jose Saramago and Hubert Selby Jr.
The entire French nation does quite well without quotation marks. It's one of the least interesting things about McCarthy's style.
I agree with this. I've read other things where the lack of dialogue quotation marks seemed to fit very well and add something, especially when the MC was a down-and-out, on the ragged edge kind of character. It signaled that the usual life conventions were out the window. Right now I'm thinking of Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks.
The entire French nation does quite well without quotation marks. It's one of the least interesting things about McCarthy's style.
They use em dashes to mark direct speech, though,
I'm in the other camp. I find him so difficult to read I never make it more than 20 pages--and yes, I can read some fairly difficult material. When I can't tell internal monologue from words spoken aloud, when it's hard to see where the POV character's individual thoughts and observations begin and end, when I cannot distinguish wishes from actions, well, I'm done.
Maryn, with plenty of books waiting to be read