Novel Study: Key Techniques

2. Novel Study: Key Techniques Character Language Themes ‘The Road’ Setting Symbolism Narrator Structure

3. Novel Study Relationships Friendships Contrasts Conflicts Death Love (paternal) Good V Evil Trust Faith and doubt Religious Survival and resilience Memory and reality Physique Weaknesses Strengths Role –hero, villain Traits Imagery Character Word choice Themes Language ‘The Road’ Register Tone Time Setting Symbolism In Time Place Structure/plot Narrator Chronological? Chapters Development Point of View Conflict First Person Third Person Multiple Key Scenes Secrets revealed Climax Neutral Biased Unreliable commenting intrusively

4. Weaknesses other Strengths decisions thoughts dialogue Traits Actions Key incidents Character Relationships Friendships Conflicts Role Contrasts physique Hero, Villain, etc. Impact on reader

5. Characterisation The Boy The Man

6. Character Quotations • “He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” Page 3 • "You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand? • Yes. • He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said. • Yes. We're still the good guys.“ Pages 80-81 • “If only my heart were stone.” Page 10 • “Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.” Page 4 • “Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you? Page 28 • “That the boy was all that stood between him and death” Page 29 • “On the gray snow a fine mist of blood.” Page 30

7. The man The boy The woman Ely The burnt man Man from the truck The little boy The naked people The cannibals (four men and two women) Three men with pipes Three men and a pregnant woman The thief A man shooting arrows A woman the man with a shotgun wife of the man with a shotgun Characters

8. Task • Using your notes and novel, in your groups complete the mind map for your character. • When you add points to the chart remember your evidence. • Either quote or give a page reference to a quotation. • Remember your class mates are relying on you to do a good job for them. • Your pair will have to report back to the class on your work.

9. Theme • The theme is the central idea(s) or message(s) of a text. • This is different from what happens in the story. It is the moral or message the author wants to give you overall. • The key question is how does the author convey the theme?

10. Warfare/environmental change Government Death Survival and resilience Memory and reality Political Theme Religion Faith and doubt Social Good versus Evil Impact of change on society Trust Fathers and sons Love (paternal) Moral Redemption

11. Writing about Theme • Clearly describe the theme. Do not use a single word or phrase but explain in more detail. • e.g. Not: The theme of the book is about survival. • More like… • McCarthy’s novel ‘The Road’ is a dark exploration of human survival. He takes the reader on a journey into the depths of humanity depravity and makes us question what we would be prepared to do to survive. Or, indeed, whether we would even want to.

12. Theme • What you have to do is identify the themes in your text. • Consider what the author is saying about them and how s/he conveys this message.

13. Writing about Theme • Mccarthy’s novel ‘The Road’ is a dark (adjective establishes your response) exploration of human survival (introduction of theme). He takes the reader on a journey into the depths of humanity depravity and makes us question what we would be prepared to do to survive. Or, indeed, whether we would even want to. (sets up the discussion to follow also makes us think about what we can cover).

14. Task • You have to tell the other members in your group what the themes are and how the author got them across • Ten minutes thinking and note taking time. • Then in turn, starting with number one each discuss with your group your points. • The group should listen carefully and ask questions to clarify your points. • Using the random generator I will then select you to answer on your novel or on another one of your group (this is to make sure you listen to each other).

15. Survival • Intro (previous slide) • Basic needs: food, shelter shoes. • Psychological: mental and moral issues • Post apocalyptic: is survival all it is cracked up to be? • Conclusion

16. Survival • Intro (previous slide) • Basic needs: food, shelter shoes. How McCarthy shows length they will go to/struggle. Search for food/cellar key scene/description • Psychological: mental and moral issues love of boy, carrying fire, struggle to want to or what you have to do. • Post apocalyptic: is survival all it is cracked up to be? Wife, Ely • Conclusion Hope

17. Task • Choose a theme from your list or mindmap • Each person in your group must choose a different theme. • Write a clear introduction to the theme. • Plan an extension/essay plan of points. • Explain clearly (writing clear notes or paragraphs) what the theme is in relation to the novel. Expand on point. • Using quotations and clear points show how the author gets across this theme. • You will have to feedback on theme to your group/class .

18. Time Place Weather Physical Setting Human Social Moral Society

19. Setting • Time • Place • Where and when is your novel set? • How is this significant to your novel. • How does the setting help to create a successful novel?

20. Setting • “Part of the achievement of The Road is its poetic description of landscapes from which the possibility of poetry would seem to have been stripped, along with their ability to support life. • Adam Mars-Jones • The Observer, Sunday 26 November 2006

21. America - and presumably the world - has suffered an apocalypse the nature of which is unclear and, faced with such loss, irrelevant. The centre of the world is sickened. Earthquakes shunt, fire storms smear a "cauterised terrain", the ash-filled air requires slipshod veils to cover the mouth. Nature revolts. The ruined world is long plundered, with canned food and good shoes the ultimate aspiration. Almost all have plunged into complete Conradian savagery: murdering convoys of road agents, marauders and "bloodcults" plunder these wastes. Most have resorted to cannibalism. One passing brigade is fearfully glimpsed: "Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. The phalanx following carried spears or lances ... and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each." Despite this soul desert, the end of God and ethics, the father still defines and endangers himself by trying to instil moral values in his son, by refusing to abandon all belief. • Alan Warner • The Guardian, Saturday 4 November 2006

22. Setting Quotations • “By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.” • “The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.” Page 137 • “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one that what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” Page 1 • “He walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of an 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.”

23. Setting Quotations • “The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anynymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.”

24. Setting Quotations • “They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.”

25. Or for those with memory overload… • “Barren, silent, godless.” Page 2

26. Narrator Narrator knows how it will turn out Colours our view

27. Narrator • Who is the narrator of your novel? • Is there more than one narrator? • Is your story told first person or third? • What is the effect of who tells the story?

28. The Ending Key Scenes Chapters Development Structureplot Conflict In Time Secrets revealed Chronological? Climax

29. Symbolism • “Investing material objects with abstract powers and meanings greater than their own; allowing a complex idea to be represented by a single object.” • Task 1) In your own words explain what symbolism is. • Task 2) What examples of symbolism exist in the novel and what is their significance?

30. Fire The Cart The Gun Symbolism The Boy The Man The Road The Sun

31. Use of Quotations(a) Short Quotations • In the novel The Boy and The Man represent the triumph of hope and goodness. The Man often reminds the boy that he should, “carry the fire”. This signifies that at very least they must keep their humanity. This internal torch could also have deeper religious connotations. He also constantly reassures The Boy that they are indeed still the “Good guys”.

32. Use of Quotations(b) Longer Quotations • Key rules: • Must be given a sensible context or introduction. • Must be part of the previous sentence. • They are introduced with a colon. • They must be end stopped as you do with every sentence. • They are set in from body of text.

33. Use of Quotations(b) Longer Quotations • McCarthy often reminds us of the precarious nature of our current world by giving us a stark reminder of an alternative future. The central character often reflects on the destruction of his world. One morning he is particularly struck by this: 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.

34. 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. The truth is indeed that he may be among the last of the humans to see the world. McCarthy makes the readers contemplate their own insignificance and fleeting time on earth. This seems to sit uncomfortably with our potential to destroy our “borrowed world.”

35. Register Tone Minimalistic Word choice Language Descriptive or poetic Imagery Archaic

36. McCarthy’s Use of Language • It can be argued that in ‘The Road’ McCarthy uses three distinct types of language: • Minimalistic • Descriptive or poetic • Archaic • What do the above terms mean? • In your own words explain what the writer is conveying in the next three slides.

37. Language 1: minimalistic • Even McCarthy’s prose echoes the world’s shearing. The rhetorical excesses that so delighted and maddened readers are, for the most part, gone. His usually spare punctuation has been reduced to periods and the occasional apostrophe. Nevertheless, he is no less the stylist — his honed sentences convey the careful impression of a language reduced to its indispensable elements. It’s entirely imaginable as a post-apocalyptic English: all the superfluity burned away, all flourish made irrelevant in the day-to-day business of survival. • Review by Benjamin Whitmer • http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307265439/thelibyrinth

38. Language 2: descriptive or poetic • His use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are hellish, a hint that “The Road” will ultimately be more radiant than it is punishing. Somehow Mr. McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it. This is art that both frightens and inspires. • http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/books/25masl.html?ex=1316836800&en=77d97481acea1b63&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

39. Language 3: archaic • McCarthy shifts between two styles in The Road. When he's waxing lyrical and getting all worked up about something lost to the world, he tends to bust out the fifty-dollar words, ones you might find in an old-fashioned King James Bible. (Sometimes McCarthy strikes us as a curator of forgotten words.) • http://www.shmoop.com/the-road-mccarthy/writing-style.html