Hey guys, I'm trying to develop a thesis for an essay I have to write about Cormac McCarthy
I read two of his books (The Road, All the Pretty Horses) and I have to develop an argument about what he is trying to say through themes.
It has to be a ten page essay so help me out, I need this thesis to be broad to cover a lot of ground
Thesis Structure: "Cormac McCarthy reveals through [BLANK] (characters, settings, ect.) that [BLANK] (theme)
If someone could help me out, that would be appreciated
>>7866692
If you read the two books why is this hard? I haven't read any McCarthy yet.
he spat
like something
and then
they rode on
YeCarthy reveals through tortillas that he spat and rode on into a corncob pipe filled with savages and scalps.
Cormac McCarthy reveals through his themes of violence, existential anxiety, and man's inhumanity to man that he's a motherfreakin' goddamn meme my man.
read bloodmeme and then write about him being a meme machine
remember when /lit/ loved mccarthy
>>7866697
I read The Road and "read" All the Pretty Horses
Inhale the memes
Exhale the memes
Inject the memes into my bloodstream
>>7866859
shit like pynchon got published
Jesus, you can't even come up with a thesis? Didn't you have any questions about his choices while you were reading his stories? Didn't you wonder anything about the characters or symbols that you thought would be fun to analyze?
It's pretty pleb tier, but when I was reading the road, I was always wondering why he went through so much effort to use complicated terminology about various things. The one scene I remember where it was crazy to me is where the dad is getting water out of some vent or something in an old house. There'd be like 5 words per page of super technical words that nobody knows. It's the same in Blood Meridian. Sure, he could be just trying to be accurate, but at some point it even detracts from the story because, unless you're some vent engineer, you just won't know these terms and you'll have to look them up.
Does this use of terminology say something about how he treats his worlds? Does it reveal something about the characters, setting, or themes? Maybe it seems like a surface analysis, but I'm sure there's something there, and you could find some interesting conclusions. Anyway, there's my serious response to a meme thread. Good luck with whatever you end up doing.
>>7866859
if it's well written they will accept it
>>7866951
this
people have done dissertations on 4chan/internet meme culture
>>7866962
take the classic Plains, trains and plantains. if your not familiar with it you should Google it. it's astounding.
>>7866969
Holy zombie jesus, this is the greatest paper I've ever read. And he fucking PASSED
>>7866945
McCarthy's protagonists are usually almost superhuman in their hands-on competence and craftiness. It starts being kind of funny when you're aware of it, like in every one of them you see McCarthy's wrinkly face recalling an encyclopedia of practical arts and handyman lore. If they have any flaws or ignorances it rarely will involve these practical skills and knowledge. The man in the Road is a good example. One specific example that always stood out to me as absurd is from Blood Meridian, when the Kid and Tobin are being chased by the Judge, and the Kid lays in a creek and starts counting when he hears the Judge enter the water upstream, then stops counting once the Judge's rippled wave hits him, and releases a bunch of grass downstream to see how far it goes at the end of the same count, to estimate the Judge's distance.
Holy shit you fucking loser. Read the rest of the Border Trilogy, read Blood Meridian and Suttree and write about the consistency occurring theme of hospitality.
You suck.
>schools let you write essays on corncob tortilla yecarthy
further proof of degeneracy of american education
>>7867128
>further proof of degeneracy of american education
What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."
Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
I'd say ditch The Road and just focus your essay on the Border Trilogy. You will be a stronger person for having read it.
>>7867133
bloom loves mccarthy
>>7866731
They still do. Blood Meridian is the shit. There are also Suttree lovers. The Road, not so much.
>>7866692
I'd love this assignment. But guess having read what you have read, I would talk about The Road being an anti-post-apocalypse post-apocalypse genre book in much the same way the Blood Meridian is an anti-western.
The genre typically treats the apocalypse much more like a liberation from our reality and than a tragedy. I would talk about how McCarthy uses symbolism in The Road to really bring this home.
There is the part where they build the gigantic fire and set the forest on fire behind them. With this context though, it doesn't matter because there is nothing left to preserve like there was in the past.
There is also the part in the library with all the books that talks about how this part of culture has become meaningless.
A simple peaceful day on the boat in nature also gone forever.
In general, values and traditions that one might not think about at first when thinking about the apocalypse. Gone forever
It is all a concerted effort to make you think twice about wishing for world death in the way that so many naively do.
You can even quote the Oprah interview where McCarthy talks about how we should be more appreciative of life.
There I wrote the whole fucking thing for you.
>>7867063
What a retard. Why didnt he just put the grass in the stream as soon as he heard the splash, wouldve saved him half the time (and in a situation like that)
Through his deliberate omission of complex grammar and syntax he reveals that you should do your own fucking homework retarded faggot
>>7867263
lol fuck off shill
yecarthy is a hack and is being rightfully recognized as one
