Quote from Suttree
"But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didn't say so" (372).
This quote embodied Cormac McCarthy's fourth novel and personified the main character, Cornelius Suttree, who traveled through the wasteland of the Tennessee River valley as a fisher of men.
Scholarship:
D. S. Butterworth's Scholarly Essay on Suttree
In Pearls As Swine: Recentering the Marginal in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree D. S. Butterworth argued that McCarthy treated the condemned characters of the Knoxville outcasts as geological and archaeological finds. According to Butterworth, McCarthy's characters were spirits who by happenstance temporarily inhabit a body. Individuals were characterized by the futility of their actions each going about their daily tasks but never actually achieving anything. Consider the scene of the Reese family who spent countless hours on the Tennessee River farming for worthless Tennessee River pearls. Just as Butterworth pointed out in his essay, alcohol, money and lust drove this family to continue to labor in vain regardless of the inevitable fact that their efforts were doomed from the beginning.
Butterworth also highlighted McCarthy's manipulation of time in Suttree. McCarthy's use of time was especially unique in two ways. First, McCarthy did not focus much attention on developing the reader's clear understanding to Suttree's past. Instead, McCarthy was simply interested in the here and now. Butterworth noted this in his essay saying, "We are introduced to Suttree and his circumstances with very little attention to what precisely happened in the past, why he does what he does, what he hopes to achieve. There is no progress, no advance...
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...number on several different occasions. He trapped Gene Harrogate in the cave for four days. On page 198, the goat man said, "I had three and it was three too many. He squinted his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. The good book says that there'll be seven women for every man. Well somebody else can have my other four what about you?" Then on page 199 McCarthy went on to mention the number four again by saying, "Jesus wept over Lazarus, said the goat man. It don't say it, but I reckon Lazarus might of wept back when he seen himself back in this vale of tears after he'd done been safe and dead four days." This quote also brings me into my second question with the novel. What was the significance with McCarthy mentioning Jesus weeping? McCarthy mentioned it twice: with the above-mentioned quote and again on page 197 when he simply said, "JESUS WEPT."
...reely. The quote can be taken in many ways, however in this case, the rats of Cannery Row represent Mack and the boys and Lee Chong, as they are both limited in their own environment. The venomous rattlesnake obviously represents Doc because of his limitless mind, but if an individual would look in between the lines, he would see that another representation of the rattlesnake would be Doc because he is the most powerful character in Cannery Row. Mack and the boys, Lee Chong, and Doc are all limited in their own ways; Mack and the boys are physically isolated due to their financial status causing them to create a system of their own. Lee Chong is psychologically limited because of his old fashion ways; thus, he is also physically bound to the community. And although Doc is not psychologically impaired, he has put himself in a physical routine of all work and no play.
...ourse, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
Many find reverence and respect for something through death. For some, respect is found for something once feared. In a passage from The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, a man cares for a wolf that has died. The prominent religious motif and the paradox contrasting beauty and terror create a sense of awe that is felt by the narrator as he cares for the wolf.
...in other parts of the novel, for example when he shot the man who threatened the boy’s life, those actions were always for the purpose of survival and to protect himself and his son. The pressure of living in a post-apocalyptic setting causes the man to always be in a highly strained emotional state and this is one of the main reasons why he reacted to the thief in such an outrageous manner. This suggests that the man is a product of his environment and so his behaviour is determined by external conditions, implying that the man lacks agency and autonomy to some extent. McCarthy’s representation of the man’s character in this extract encourages the reader to think about whether moral rules, which were established in a normal civilisation, can still exist in a world where all civilisation is destroyed and if they can how will people ensure that they are carried out.
My presentation will be about the depiction and meaning of violence and human nature, in C.M.’s novels.
McCarthy wrote the novel in ways that force readers to remove themselves from their comfort zones. He wrote The Road with a lack of punctuation that can make things somewhat confusing for readers. Some critics find that without quotation marks it makes the book hard to follow. But when I read the book I found that after the first fifty pages I understood when the characters were speaking. Finding that I had to pay a little more attention didn’t bother ...
Filled with a plethora of themes and convictions, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men excels in its endeavor to maintain the reader’s mind racing from cover to cover. The setting is the Texas-Mexico boarder; the story embodying a modernized western-themed Greek tragedy filled with drug runners and automatic weapons. Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran, finds himself on the run from forces that seem to be an instrument of karmic consequence. While on the run, Llewelyn is given the opportunity to end the madness that has arisen so immediately in his life. But he doesn’t. Instead he braves on, defying his own advice, and persistent on luck, only leaving him a misfortunate ending. To fully recognize the circumstance the novel surrounds itself in the reader must digress into the thoughts of the town’s Sheriff, an old vet just like Llewelyn, named Ed Tom Bell. From there and with a deep analysis of Llewelyn Moss, McCarthy succors light to why such an assessment was made amongst the lawless violence that has entered this town.
he Road, written by Cormac McCarthy was inspired by a trip he took with his young son to El Paso Texas. He was imaging what the town would look like 100 years into the future and he though of “fires on the hill” and then thought about his son's safety. McCarthy admitted to having conversations with his brother about different scenarios for the apocalypse. For example, cannibalism, “when everything is gone, the only thing left to eat is each other.” He made some notes about this vision of his, but didn't act on it until a few years later in 2006, while in Ireland. He started and finished the novel and dedicated it to his son, John Francis McCarthy.
"Of Mice and Men" is a play written by John Steinbeck that focuses on life during the mid 1930's. This play has many recurring themes, and one of these themes is that of loneliness. This loneliness is because of the intolerance of society on those who are different. The underlying, yet stunningly obvious, theme of loneliness can be found in many characters with many examples. This loneliness due to isolation and intolerance is found in the characters of Candy, because he is old and useless; Crooks, because he is black and crippled; and Curley's wife, because she is a beautiful woman and the only girl on and all guy ranch.
Maggie and Jimmie, siblings whom Cranes uses as protagonists, live in deplorable and violent conditions. The setting is America West, during the industrialization era. The change from agricultural to industrial economy led to many casualties, including Maggie and Jimmie’s parents. They found themselves in periphery of economic edifice where poverty was rampant. Now alcoholics, they are incapable of offering parental care and support to their children. This leaves the children at the mercies of a violent, vain, and despondent society that shapes them to what they became in the end. Cranes’ ability to create and sustain characters that readers can empathize with is epic though critics like Eichhorst have lambasted his episodic style (23). This paper will demonstrate that in spite of its inadequacy, Cranes Novella caricatures American naturalism in a way hitherto unseen by illustrating the profound effect of social circumstances on his characters.
McCarthy’s plot is built around a teenage boy, John Grady, who has great passion for a cowboy life. At the age of seventeen he begins to depict himself as a unique individual who is ambitious to fulfill his dream life – the life of free will, under the sun and starlit nights. Unfortunately, his ambition is at odds with the societal etiquettes. He initiates his adventurous life in his homeland when he futilely endeavors to seize his grandfather’s legacy - the ranch. John Grady fails to appreciate a naked truth that, society plays a big role in his life than he could have possibly imagined. His own mother is the first one to strive to dictate his life. “Anyway you’re sixteen years old, you can’t run the ranch…you are being ridiculers. You have to go to school” she said, wiping out any hopes of him owning the ranch (p.15). Undoubtedly Grady is being restrained to explore his dreams, as the world around him intuitively assumes that he ought to tag along the c...
"There is nothing more dangerous than a large segment of people in society that feel that they have no place or stake in it, who feel they have nothing to lose. People who have stake in the society perpetuate that society, when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it." Unknown
Huck Finn - the central character of the novel and the son of the town drunk.
Through the use of recurring ideas of death, hope and reality, McCarthy conveys that there is no escape; either from the universal destruction caused by the apocalypse or the emotionally destructive effects of dreams. In The Road, dreams reveal the human nature of the characters. McCarthy illustrates the gradual dehumanization of people when life completely changes; he argues that all the terrible things that people could do have already been done, underlining the frailty of our existence. McCarthy ultimately shows us how reliant we are on the past and that we must let go of the past to make way for the future.
People always like to refer to themselves as “independent”. Independence may seem like a great ideal in modern society, but in a post-apocalyptic world, a sense of dependence is unavoidable. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs help us to understand what people depend on. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, survival of the boy and the man is due to their dependence on their human nature and ability to support one another.