Dating in the Apocalypse

Seriously, Watch Whiplash

So upon request I thought I’d spend this blog post comparing some of the ideas from No Country for Old Men and The Road. Both of these novels were written by McCarthy, and frankly both are very grim. They’re nothing like the opening scene of La La Land where people are dancing and singing a wonderful song in traffic and just for a short while you forget about the existential dread of being single for the last seven months. God that was an amazing movie. I often listen to the soundtrack on the way to school and I think my sister is becoming increasingly concerned about a developing obsession with Damien Chazelle who directed both Whiplash and La La Land. Also if you still haven’t seen Whiplash, I’m disappointed but forgive you. Watch it tonight and forget about actual responsibilities like AP Literature blog posts.

McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men a year before The Road. No Country for Old Men was a thrilling novel because of it’s non-traditional approach to a cat-and-mouse plot structure. If one was watching the film they’d probably take notice to the unique and patient cinematography and how it subtly built tension. Maybe that’d be enough to have it stand out in memory from other cat-and-mouse thrillers, but a novel can’t accomplish the same effect as easily. That’s because a film can just implant short periods of inactivity and boring character actions to keep the viewer waiting. This filler information in a novel doesn’t accomplish the same thing in a novel because the filler text kills the flow of the scene and also the reader can change the pace at which they read, destroying the effect altogether. Instead, developing some characters that the reader can easily anticipated, developing some that the reader cannot, and organizing the interactions carefully builds this tension. McCarthy does just this in No Country for Old Men, and fails to replicate it in The Road.

Spoiler for No Country for Old Men, but our villain survives and accomplishes his task. Why is this important and successful? Because in practically every film and novel our protagonist overcomes a seemingly impossible task and that’s the ending. The effect of a bitter ending itself doesn’t surprise everyone, because there are many films that do it, but setting up stereotypical characters, each with their own glaring problems, and then having villain to knock the entire setup down is the genius of this novel. The villain makes us feel uncomfortable because we both can but don’t want to anticipate his actions.

As a character, Chigurh is completely consistent the entire novel. He kills everyone in his path, and uses a coin to decide the fate of people that he encounters but don’t impede him. So as a reader we can anticipate what he is going to do, because he is consistent so far, but we are thinking in the back of our head that he will encounter trouble from our good-intentioned hero in a climax scene with our morally ambiguous protagonist. Wrong. Chigurh kills our protagonist, the sheriff chooses to not confront our antagonist, and Chigurh kills another innocent person and escapes. Sure, it’s a counter-intuitive ending, but it’s also demonstrates his ability as a character to manipulate the reader's ability to anticipate him.

So The Road loses the interesting characters, gains a predictable ending, and keeps the dark themes. Centrally, we only have two characters in The Road. This choice alone communicates to the reader that our characters will survive until the climax because otherwise the novel would lose all of it’s drive. When a reader knows that there are central characters in a plot they anticipate those characters will overcome challenges almost unanimously. As an author, loosely setting up various characters in a stereotypical good vs. evil plot allows for the author to surprise us with how conflict arises and what happens to the characters while simultaneously killing our ability to anticipate. The father and son encounter conflict in our novel, but we know they’ll survive these preliminary conflicts, and so the only distinguishing factor left is how dark these conflicts are, and what they communicate in terms of theme.

Having the father and son explore a dark and terrible world allows for only two driving forces for entertainment: conflict and connection. Since we already know our characters must survive these conflicts, all that is left is connection. Considering we’re bombarded with violent characters and an aggressively grim setting we can anticipate that our two characters will bond over small joys.

As the novel comes to a close we know that our author is going to offer us one final conflict. Here, because our characters have not received any dire consequences from previous encounters, we know that something major is going to have to happen. Probably death considering the dire conditions our characters face, but that would be too stereotypical for McCarthy. So instead of merely killing off the father for an ending, considering it’s a plot stereotype, McCarthy does end the novel there. Instead, the boy is accepted into a group and there is reasonable development of the son’s preliminary encounters with these new characters which offers a softer ending. But no, it’s no No Country for Old Men unfortunately.