hey Veeky Forums,
What are some important things to look out for in this novel in terms of symbolism and allusion?
Hey Veeky Forums
Juan Taylor
Other urls found in this thread:
nytimes.com
oyc.yale.edu
twitter.com
Levi Baker
Look for the flecks of corn in the shit you're going to be reading.
Zachary Cooper
You'll never get the full picture unless you've read and understood The Divine Comedy, The Bible, and have a general understanding of Roman and Greek mythologies.
Charles Garcia
symbolism of the early tarot reading
Cooper Morris
The spitting
Review the spitting parts again and a nice easter egg of literary knowledge just might jump out at you ;)
Christian Green
Just use shmoop because you are not going to get a good answer for a serious literary question like that on this board.
Michael Jenkins
YeCarthy isn't serious literature.
Mason Cook
The references to wolves symbolize man's tendency for violence in an organized manner. Notice how in the desert things get very dreamlike and somewhat repetitive. The Glanton gang have become like wild beasts at this point. The gang refuses to kill wolves because they consider them one of their own.
Stone seems to represent the ability of man to exert dominion over a harsh world. This is given in the parable of the harnessmaker that the judge uses to draw analogies with the mason indians. The ancient indian civilization he describes were stonecrafters. The harnessmaker kills the traveller with a stone. The judge is also sitting on a boulder when the gang first men him, and uses sulphur from the earth to improvise gunpowder and kill the indians. Stone also represents the age of the earth and mans temporal irrelevance - in his speech on war, the judge says mans opinion on war is about as relevant as his opinion on stone. Meaning our violent tendencies are longstanding. The judge also studies fossils because he sees knowledge as an end to power.
Lucas Flores
Make note of all the missing children.
Jaxson James
He won a pulitzer. Nobody cares if you find him inaccessible.
Jose Torres
The judge himself is a personification of war. Treacherous, terrifying and undying. He comes out on top of every situation as the sole victor. He degrades the moral standards of those around him. He doesn't really obey rules but uses them to his benefit when it suits him. He seeks knowledge not for enlightenment but pure dominance and brutality. Notice how he converses with bandits like glanton and army generals.
Robert Martinez
>he's such a pleb he thinks YeCarthy is hard and the pulitzer is legit
nytimes.com
>"It is not a serious novelist's nightmare (the possibility is so absurd); nevertheless, suppose you fancied yourself a serious novelist (a writer, as they say, of the first rank), and a wire were delivered in your dream (the telephone rang, there was a sudden knock), and this were followed by the formal announcement that you, Julia Peterkin, or you, Marjorie Rawlings, or you, Allen Drury or Michael Shaara or Alison Lurie, had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for 1929 or '39 or '60 or '75 or '85. Well, what a pleasant supposition: to receive a prize, a famous one at that, with considerable prestige and the presumption of increased sales as well as other benefits. Why should such a compliment to your art be denied; why should the thought be unlikely, the award embarrassing, the fact nightmarish? Because the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill - not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley."
Juan Evans
Corncobbers btfo
Ethan Sanders
This is some brilliant analysis. I would never have thought that the judge is the personification of war.
Jace Bailey
Serious question. Is this a meme or is it actually good?
Wyatt Allen
...
Chase Howard
Nobody cares, dude. Start your own thread if you hate him so much, the OP is asking for an analysis of literary techniques, not generic criticism of McCarthy himself.
Thanks. I've actually heard him called a personification before I even read the book, but all the other shit in those two posts was my own annotations. McCarthy rarely comments directly on his works due to being reclusive so you have to unravel it a bit.
If the Judge represents the active force of war, I'd say the kid represents lost innocence, but also resilience. Notice how many children go "missing". War has no boundaries and even children aren't sheltered from things like wartime rape or simple death. I think the phrase "he who lives by the sword will perish by the sword" is very applicable to this novel. One man mentions it, Irving I think. The boy, when he becomes "the man" thinks he might be safe from the judge, but gets randomly raped and mangled (implicit) at the end. This is a common theme in McCarthy's works. Compare Anton Chigurgh getting suddenly hit by a car at the end of No Country For Old Men.
Nathan Reed
Given his personality I doubt McCarthy even wanted it desu. He was obviously resentful of being in the public eye when Oprah gave him publicity, but he's 80 and his son is like 10, so I think he's venturing out at the end of his life and trying to accumulate some inheritance.
Lincoln Reed
that depends. Are you a pretentious pseudo intellectual?
Charles Brooks
>McCarthy spends 300 or so pages describing all manner of grizzly horrors and brutal acts of war
>whatever fate befalls the kid is simply indescribable, words wouldn't do it justice
David Ramirez
Yeah I'm sure McCarthy invented omission.
Nicholas Peterson
Yeah I'm sure that's not what I was implying at all
Logan Cruz
It's complete shit that teens and undergrads wank over for being the DEEPest thing ever.
Aaron Hughes
I don't have much to add myself but there are a couple lectures from a lit class at yale about the book that are worthwhile
Nicholas Garcia
It's a genuinely masterful book.
Read 'Moby-Dick' first.
Where some kids try too hard to hype it (which hasn't happened on this board in quite a while either) some contrarian kids will do what this clown is doing here just as much. The ride never ends, remember.
Jonathan Allen
Yeah I'm sure I care about not strawmanning a pleb