A Limited Palette

Cormac McCarthy writes with a limited palette in The Road, like a painter choosing a restricted range of colours. Certain adjectives crop up repeatedly, for instance, ‘gray’ and ‘ashen’. The dialogue often follows a similar pattern, ending with the father asking the boy if he’s ‘okay’ and the boy responding ‘okay.’ The sentence structures are also often highly repetitive, with simple and compound sentences being used rather than complex ones.
Here are some possible literary analyses of why this limited palette might have been chosen by the writer. 

1. Choose those you most agree with and find examples from the text to illustrate the analysis being made. 

1. The limited linguistic palette and repetitive techniques echo the monotony of the post-apocalyptic world that is described: 

“This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.” 

“He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark."

1. There is a powerfully poetic effect in the simplicity of the language. By avoiding rhetorical flourishes and elaborate language the writer makes a stronger impact. 

“Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.” 

“Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.”

It’s easy to oversimplify when talking about a writer’s style and although Cormac McCarthy is known for the spareness of his prose, there are also moments of rich lyricism in The Road. 

1. Have a look again at the opening page of the novel, where the man is described waking from a dream. Phrases like the following are full of figurative language and poetic vocabulary: ‘Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast.’ Dreams and moments of waking seem to be evoked in this more lush language. 
2. Find other examples of this in the novel. 

“And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.” 

"Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.” 

3. Can you think of other instances where the language is of a different kind? Find examples and explain what the qualities of the language are and why you think language is being used in this way.

“And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.” - The language here is similar to the 'dream language', it is very poetic and less simplistic. It may have been used to highlight that this quote is different from the rest of the book, it shows how bittersweet the man is, in the most truthful way: he hopes, but almost in a realistic manner, "lost to the same indifferent sun". 

4.Look again at the literary analysis statements above. Either re-write one of these analytical statements or draft your own to reflect your discoveries about the variations in McCarthy’s prose style.

The simplistic language and limited palette used by McCarthy throughout the duration of the novel highlights the bleakness of the characters immediate surroundings. McCathy uses more poetic language when wanting to make a statement clearer through his writing; when he wants to highlight that a certain quote is different from his basic, repetitive, american horror text.