Comparing The Road And All The Pretty Horses By Cormac Mccarthy

Improved Essays
Marie Davis
11th Advanced English
30 November 2017
The Differences in Cormac McCarthy writing theme styles in The Road and All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy is a well-known great American novelist. Cormac McCarthy is considered one of the leading writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries(“overview” par 1). In many senses his novels have been compared to Dreams. While some people love his novels because they are interesting and easy to follow, his novels have also been well known for his use of criticism in his writing. Out of all the things that people love and notice about his writing is the way he is almost fascinated by the give and take between modern day humans and the multiple systems that are exposed to in
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The two main characters have lost complete and total contact with other decent people. For the man the isolation means something more, it compounds into alienation. His memories of a previous and better world makes the world that the man is in now seem all the more terrible However the way McCarthy uses isolation in this novel with the father and son being isolated to themselves and For most of the novel the two have each wish makes the isolation more bearable I guess you could say because at least it Is shared between the two of them so much so that the man has a dream and it includes the boy and all the destruction “The Road indeed commences with a scene in which the father has a nightmare vision of humankind's participation in its own”(“Cooper” par 11). An example would be the line in the book that says “They have nothing; just a pistol to defends themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of savaged food and each other”
(The Book) However in All the Pretty Horses McCarthy uses the theme of coming of man and the natural world. In this novel the natural world cares nothing at all for mankind. Wild animals like horses exist outside of town as if they are a civilization themselves instead of individual animals which in this novel makes people strange to them. What makes this theme neat
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It’s odd that he even uses this theme in this book because the world he describes in this novel is a dog eat dog world so it’s not the best place to be to be trying to be nice to people. With McCarthy making this world such a bad place, compassion means even more in this book than it would in other instances. McCarthy uses compassion in a weird way in this novel because McCarthy mostly associated compassion with the little child in the novel witch happens to be the protagonist of the novel. McCarthy doing this makes the reader see compassion in a little different point of view. The way McCarthy Writes about compassion in this novel aligns it more with naivetés than goodness as we would usually see it, but it’s hard to maintain such a cynical view because just when u think u have read the most disturbing thing possible a character would do something so kind. McCarthy in my point of view wrote about compassion in this way to send the reader a message. That compassion is something not required but something that is given. In All the Pretty Horses McCarthy takes a very different aspect and focuses on Traditions and customs as one of his main themes but to no surprise McCarthy doesn’t write about the fun traditions and customs that u would usually think about in this novel the traditions of the upper class are a problem because of the expectations and social customs that come with high status of being upper

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