Will someone explain to me what the fuck that epilogue was?

Will someone explain to me what the fuck that epilogue was?

They put sticks in the ground that go boom.

I think McCarthy is so difficult to understand at times purely because he has the same atrocious, lazy habit of teenagers first learning to write.

The problem is that they have a general understanding of how a sentence should be constructed to sound beautiful (i.e. varying clause lengths, picking A E S T H E T I C synonyms), but they lack the language skills to consistently create beautiful sentences using the ideas or images in their head. Rather than simply working harder to find a better sentence or contenting themselves with one that's a bit shit, they say fuck it and throw in fancy-sounding words that only vaguely relate to the actual idea they're thinking of.

Take this classic line from The Road, for example.

>He rose and stood tottering in that cold __autistic dark__ with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.

In this instance, I think McCarthy's line of thought would have been like

>i want the atmosphere to sound like it's sinister, like the character's living in an universe indifferent to all the misery awaiting him
>what's a word associated with that?
>hmm, i remember hearing something the other day on the TV, some news pieces about indifference and a lack of emotion
>*precedes to not pick up a dictionary*
>*precedes to not think of the word apathetic*
>"autistic dark", yeah that sounds about right

Some people mistake this habit of his for poetry, but it's just pure shit.

>He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.

I don't even like Mariachi Faulkner that much but that's a pretty fucking cool sentence.

That's sort of the point. He writes tons of cool-sounding sentences/passages, but the trade-off is that they're occasionally nonsensical. It's like reading a much less schizophrenic version of Finnegans Wake-era Joyce who is obsessed with murder and not as intelligent.

ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

Some user earlier today recommended Suttree but added:
>Has some parts that make you think the man hasn't got his plates all ordered in his cupboard

I think that's a very good descriptor of his work in general

Classic pasta, I can't get past "pyrolatrous coagulate" without laughing my ass off

...

I think it's McCarthy repudiating the judge's idea that only war gives order to life. Whoever those wanderers are, they are bringing some sort of order without violence. What exactly they are doing you're probably supposed to decide for yourself.

...a serious reply?.... on Veeky Forums?

You'd be surprised how many serious replies there are on Veeky Forums. People type text that is so long you assume it must be a copypasta but nope, it's something that someone typed specifically as a response to your post.

you are dead wrong, the point isn't that the world is indifferent. "autistic dark" fits because the dead world they are inhibiting is dumb, without sense and low in intelligence in every way and only way to survive is to endlessly repeat the scavengers' procedure like some terrible mathematical calculation

examine the following:

>the slow surf crawled and seethed in the dark and he thought about his life but there was no life to think about and after a while he walked back.

>He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Was the Kid Jesus?

well that's just darn crazy

No, I don't think there's anything to support this. He's more like a vessel for the reader and nothing more.

from the last time we had this thread:
>From what I gather, the fire (sparks from the tool striking the rocks as it digs holes) represent the conflict that is byproduct of man's interaction with nature (God's creation). we cannot interact with the world without there being some sort of destructive fallout. The holes represent man's creation (as opposed to God's). A hole is nothing, which from an existential standpoint is the sum of man's creation: everything we endeavor to create is ultimately nothing. Each hole is identical, a perfect circle at measured increments. This is indicative of the nature of man's creation. We create things on a metric not found in nature. God does not use straight lines or perfect circles or perfect increments. We don't know where the man came from or where he is going, just that he is progressing along, creating perfect holes at perfect increments, striking sparks without realizing it.
I think it's an allegory for the "progress" of mankind. each hole dependant on the hole before, but ultimately identical.

I wish I could think this well. I'm so fucking stupid.

>autistic dark
Is this shit for real? I don't touch modern Murican writers beyond Hemingway but there is no way McCarthy can be THAT shitty given all the hype.

That's not what "autistic" means though. The least you can expect of a writer is to use the correct words.
The other examples are alright though.

meme lord

They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague.

These people had seen Americans in plenty, dusty laggard trains of them months out of their own country and half crazed with the enormity of their own presence in that immense and bloodslaked waste, commandeering meal and meat or indulging a latent taste for rape among the sloe-eyed girls of that country.

I didn't understand it either. I thought it someone building railroads.

Can you provide one or more examples of a sentence of his you do not like, as I think this user does a good job of explaining it as passable and acceptable, I would personally agree, but lets say you may still have a point, more examples would be nice.

Even the judge is powerless against the rising power of industrialism. His time of violence is over.

>His time of violence is over.

Someone missed the point.

he will never die boyo

>Will someone explain to me what the fuck that epilogue was?
Just ignore this juvenile tryhard poser of an "author" and it will go away.

I don't have the book on me atm to quote the exact passage but Ill do my best.

From what I can recall, the book's epilogue reinforces the previous final scene of the Judge's eternal violence. He is a self proclaimed 'god of war' and he will never die.

The tool the person is using has to be a representation of the advancing industrialisation that is starting to take place. The tool is violating the ground and disturbing the soil. This violent act is showing that the Judge's philosophy is correct and that though the Earth is becoming more and more modernized, violence will always be the dominate force that drives humanity.

In fact, the Mennonite previously stated before
to the Captain and The Kid headed to Mexico that disturbing the ground there will wake up more than stray dogs or something and that no good will come of it. Maybe less specifically foreshadowing and more of a sort of indirect prophecy concerning humanity's violent nature. I think Bloom may have described it as such but BM is a sort of a parable twisted on its head to illustrate the immoral rather than a moral lesson.

As for the people following, we learned previously from The Kid, then recently turned a Man at that point, that they were thieves and murderers so it could be a reinforcement of humanity's existing violence, but it could also be a motif similar to something like the wandering Jew or Cain from the Bible. Anyways if I had the text in front of me I could probably pull more out of it but I hope that helped.

If you weren't a Veeky Forums user who is used to reading "autistic" hundreds of times a day to describe pretty much anything, that would seem like a perfectly fine sentence.

he never sleeps, the judge. he says that he'll never die

It's a post-hole digger user.
He's digging holes with a post-hole digger so the people following behind can put fence posts and telephone poles into the holes.

Those who do not gather or search are the women.