Literary Journal - 2 : Cormac McCarthy

   Even though not many readers recognize his name, you might have heard of his works since many of them were made into movies. "No Country for Old Men"(2007), "The Road"(2009) and "All the Pretty Horses"(2000) have been filmed based on his works. His private personal life contributes to the themes of his work. (He rarely shows up on TV or magazine articles --throughout his writing career, he only had a few interviews)

   My mother being a big McCarthy fan, I first started reading his works several years ago. No Country for Old Men was the first book of his I read and then I started reading The Road and Blood Meridian (although I never finished Blood Meridian). What I could tell for sure is that his stories are not like something I had ever read before.

   His works are original and radical. What I mean by radical is he defies the old naive themes found in many contemporary works. What I found really amazing about his works is that he seeks peace among violence. For instance, he throws a brutal and devastating setting or situation, and then he looks through the eyes of each character calmly and peacefully to find peace and silence. His story(the actual plot) does not necessarily carry themes and ideas, which I find revolutionary(and that's what make his works different from cheap horror stories). Rather, readers question themselves about their life and death, eventually converting the story into the themes of their own.

   Like you cannot taste each ingredient of a food when you put too many things in it, it's hard to analyze life when we are given too many things. But when we lose everything, we really start to see the essence of our life. It is easier to find the truth in violence than in happiness. Literature has been a means of mankind to seek for the true meaning of our life. And McCarthy provided a new way of doing that. Instead of dipping his words into Greek philosophy or Biblical allusions, he rather goes out to the nowhere and stares at the floating nothingness.

   To talk a little more about his books, I consider The Road as one of the best American novel ever written. As some of you might know, it is a story of a father and a son striving for survival in a devastated world. The story line is fairly simple and it's hard to pull out many themes and motifs in this story. Even McCarthy himself  says the meaning of the novel is straightforward(watch the interview linked beneath). But what makes this work so great is that it is so human. You can write about a great hero using his supernatural power to save the world and make it a bestseller. But true essence of human nature and vulnerability is shown when the characters don't possess anything and don't have anything to hide or show off.

   We walk along the road everyday. Life is a journey and we can't tell what's going to happen during that journey. Sometimes the road is full of dangers and sometimes it is peaceful and comforting. But the most important thing is we don't stop walking until we run out of time and energy. We just keep walking every minute and hour dipping our feet into the sticky mud. How simple is that?

McCarthy Interview