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Topic: McCarthy's Southern Works
Thread: TR's deus ex machina

Total messages for all days: 26

TR's deus ex machina	KevinM	11/21/2008
A few days ago, I opined that TR’s ending was manipulative, because the ending that seemed certain – fearing his own death, the father mercy kills his son to “protect” him from cannibals -- is replaced by the arrival of a deus ex machina. I got some feedback that other readers didn’t see this in their reading. So I read TR again, and here’s my summary narrative on TR’s murder/suicide solution. We read that Dad has a pistol (page 11) and two bullets left (47). Before she left the family, he and his wife had pre-text discussions of suicide (49). Dad uses one bullet to kill a cannibal who has been eyeing his son (55-6), then holds his sleeping son, rocking back and forth: “A single round left in the revolver. You will not face the truth. You will not.” (58). There’s an odd little paragraph which looks back to when the wife was still present which includes the line, “There were three cartridges in the pistol. None to spare.” (74) Later, Dad unlocks a cannibal’s pantry just as the cannibals return. Dad and son flee into the woods. Dad thinks, “This is the moment. This is the moment. He fell to the ground and pulled the boy to him … in the other hand he was holding the pistol” [with one bullet left]. (94-55). A moment later, he is drilling the son on extra-text discussions on how to use a pistol to kill yourself. “You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point it up. Do it quick and hard. Do you understand?” (95) A moment later Dad is having an anguished moment wondering what he would do if, at the crucial moment, the gun didn’t fire. “Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?” (96) For the next 100 pages, the pistol is frequently mentioned as part of the essential equipment the two pass back and forth. The father transfers the gun to the son every time they’re apart, an action that becomes more portentous, since the son and the reader now know what the pistol and its single remaining bullet are for. Later, having reached the ocean, the son loses the pistol and both father and son panic until they find it. (195-6) Part of Dad’s final words to his son is this: “I can’t hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could, but I can’t.” Dad’s journey then ends and the deus ex machina swoops in to rescue the son who finally relinquishes the pistol. So my .02 is that the murder/suicide ending is introduced early in TR, is made explicit by the middle and ends unexpectedly when characters we haven’t met before appear for the rescue. I think it’s clearly a device used by the author to keep the reader in a page-turning frenzy. Wasn’t it Chekhov who said if an author mentions a pistol on the mantle, he has to use it in the story? In TR, the pistol travels with father and son as a third protagonist, more or less. Other posters said the murder/suicide solution has already been discussed. I searched but did not find, and if my comments are redundant to some, perhaps they’ll be less so to others. I have to say, after rereading TR, that I’m not surprised the movie’s release date has been postponed.

TR's deus ex machina	mff8785	11/21/2008
In the eyes of the author and me there are myriad of events that are worse than death or suicide, to name a few: being eaten alive by cannibals bit by bit, or even being a catamite for a brief period of time and then being eaten alive bit by bit. The father wants the freedom of ending their own lives with dignity. Unlike mom, they use their strength with a bit of courage and push-on, and they survive. They win. The father dies of what we can consider to be "natural causes" and the son finds society to keep the fire going. They win, they survive. The gun provides the duo with the only sense of dignity possible in this world; shooting yourself dead is much better than being eaten after being a catamite or being tortured. I can't consider the ending a deus ex machina, because the father and son survive: mission accomplished. I've never understood the dialogue that many have undertaken regarding the end of this novel: is it a hopeful/ positive ending or is it a gloomy/pessimistic ending? The ending is neither; it depicts father guiding his son toward survival without having to deviate from "right" or "goodness." Yes, it was Chekhov who said that about the gun on the mantle, and yes the pistol in The Road is the only hope they have of finding dignity in the hands of barbaric men who prowl The Road for meat.

TR's deus ex machina	robj	11/21/2008
Kevin, Maybe it is a contrived ending... a 'Pollyanna' ending... like the Hemingway short story title, 'Nobody Ever Dies.' If you've read McCarthy's other works, you're aware that he's not overly sentimental. Not terribly weepy. He has no issue with showing the reader a trailer trash toddler engulfed in an arson's flames (Child of God) or the murder of a listless infant (lank swamp hare) in 'Outer Dark.' Or a dead baby tree in 'Blood Meridian.' Or a wayward young man smothered in a shithouse ('Blood Meridian.') In fact, the dead youths in the McCarthy canon are so plentiful that they could become punchlines. So when he decides to spare a youth, it is quite jarring -- as in 'The Road.' Occasionally, even in real life, the cavalry arrives. Once in a great while an intervention occurs. Every millenium or so justice triumphs... mercy pours down like rain. You can choose to believe otherwise, but in my short life I have seen this occur... infrequently, yes... but it does happen. If I recall correctly, one of the father's final pronouncements in 'The Road' is something along the lines of 'Goodness will find the child.' This might sound sappy, sentimental, overwrought. But I can tell you, as the father of a toddler, and the relationship I have cultivated with her, it would be awful tough for me to blow her brains out as long as there existed even a shred of possibility she might survive without me in similar survival circumstances. I put my stock in the kid and hope like hell that goodness will find her... pretty much against the odds. But tell me, what other option is there?

TR's deus ex machina	robj	11/21/2008
ps -- The Father kicks off before 'Parka Man' arrives. So for all The Father knows, the kid will have to fend for himself. The Father is not privy to the fact that the child will get taken in by the Bandoliered Bedouins. But, in spite of his misgivings, the dad does hold on to some thread of hope. So maybe he belives the kid will make out OK. Rob

TR's deus ex machina	glass	11/21/2008
Kevin: Interesting thread. McCarthy possibly would be more inclined to subvert or invert any Chekovian formula than to play by those "rules." But the gun was introduced and it was used to kill the bearded, rachitic road agent. And it seems important that the boy wasn't in any imminent danger at the time of the man's death. If Harmon and the bearded one were poised to slay the child like in Outer Dark after Culla handed over his son for slaughter, then maybe the man's actions would have been different. But he was not forced into making a decision, an important mitigating factor when viewing the scene in my view. There are some situations that occur near the coast that may have led the man to believe there are some good guys nearby. The gun for me was always a symbol of self-preservation and self-defense rather than one of self-destruction. They panicked when they lost the weapon not because it was needed to kill the child, but to keep the bad guys at bay. Food, shoes, the gun. A scholar I met this summer shared with me some interesting ideas on these final scenes in The Road and why they thought McCarthy handled them the way he did. Made a lot of sense to me. I am very much looking forward to seeing these ideas further explicated in a forthcoming book. And I agree with Rob when he said, "...it would be awful tough for me to blow her brains out as long as there existed even a shred of possibility she might survive without me in similar survival circumstances." Sir Edmund Burke's ideas may be of note here as it pertains to a comparison of the man's state of mind in the cannibal cellar scene when there was imminent danger and the death scene at the end of The Road when there was not: "For when we have suffered from any violent emotion, the mind naturally continues in something like the same condition, after the cause which first produced it has ceased to operate. The tossing of the sea remains after the storm; and when this remain of horror has entirely subsided, all the passion, which the accident raised, subsides along with it...passions which concern self-preservation, turn mostly on pain and danger...The passions therefore which are conversant about the preservation of the individual turn chiefly on pain and danger, and they are the most powerful of all the passions." (On the Sublime and Beautiful) Peter

TR's deus ex machina	Rick Wallach	11/21/2008
I almost feel like McCarthy was spending some of his amoral capital in that ending - you know, his letting the boy live was kind of like Nixon opening China. No liberal could have gotten away with that, but McCarthy could get away with sparing the boy where other, more softhearted writers, could not without being accused of writing like a literary Rod McKuen.

TR's deus ex machina	blackhiller	11/22/2008
Rob, The kid is now the man when jaked in BM, and he's 45, I believe, which as a half-centenarian, I do hope is a young man, I suppose, at least most of the time. . . . Nothing wrong with honest sentiment like yours. Sentiment and oversentimentalism or maudlinism are different things. Nicely said, Rob. The entire book points to the young boy surviving. And how deus ex machina-istic is it that after having run into absolutely no other fire carrying good godspoke folk throughout the entire novel save these last couple pages that the boy finally does? The odds mean it's likely. McCarthy's built it all in pretty carefully, including a possible previous appearance by Parka Man (don't ask; I haven't yet decided myself) and Parka Man's words about how they've been watching the boy and debating what to do about him (their ultimate decision dovetails nicely with the boy's own inherent ethics). As _The Stonemason_ says, "The moral arc of the universe is long, but in the end it bends toward justice."

TR's deus ex machina	glass	11/22/2008
>>>>>including a possible previous appearance by Parka Man (don't ask; I haven't yet decided myself)<<<< Dave: Where is this in the book? Just kidding, but I'd honestly like to know where you think this might occur. Even a hint would be welcome. Peter

TR's deus ex machina	mff8785	11/22/2008
The father and son weren't the only "good" people heading south toward the water during the winter. "Good" folk wouldn't be content sitting around, sedentary sodomizing and munching on their own kind. Plus, If your going to bump into other "good" people after the Modern world has been destroyed, I'd figure that it would be in a warmer climate close to water, so to assume that McCarthy narratologically bailed on the man and his son may be a bit hasty. I feel confident enough to say that I know McCarthy- I trust he wouldn't cut a work of art short due to a lack of ideas or a publishing deadline. I'm only 31, but I know that there's alot going on by the waterhole. "The moral arc of the universe is long, but in the end it bends toward justice." Dave, The Stonemason and The Gardener's Son are something special, underrated in teh McCarthy cannon and I'm surprised there's not much more published on them.

TR's deus ex machina	robj	11/22/2008
blackhiller, Thanks for the correction on The Kid's age... I keep thinking of him as a more youthful Kid when in fact he's got a lot of hard mileage and years on him by the time he gets the herniating hug. And thank you for The Stonemason passage. That is one fine sentence. Rob

TR's deus ex machina	blackhiller	11/22/2008
Rob, When I've written about the kid on forum or in conference papers, the diss, whatever, I always have to be careful myself about which he is when. He's so much better developed as the kid and really doesn't seem to have changed all that much in the intervening 28 years. That takes us back to the Wordsworth allusion at the opening relative to "child [as] father of the man" and the allusion's and the whole novel's subversion of the (and I think extension into a "New" sort of) Romantic.

TR's deus ex machina	cdacus	11/22/2008
I am of the opinion the the ending of TR is purposely ironic or tongue in cheek. In light of the last paragraph, which de-emphasizes humanity, I would argue that McCarthy is in fact trying to lead the reader to see that the unexpected turn is really not something over which to become overly optimistic. The father and the boy follow the road to their personalized form of transcendence, as it were, but this should not be interpreted as extending beyond the incidental case which it exemplifies. Thus there is no salvation for humanity as a whole, but rather only in identification with the whole. Such a strident and self-sacrificing form of spirituality (Eastern in its metaphysical view) will never be popularized in Western modernity. Of course, in TR Western modernity has come to an end.

TR's deus ex machina	KevinM	11/22/2008
Thank you for your notes. By your leave, I offer clarifying comments -- Deus ex machina – The accepted definition of this phrase is a plot tactic in which something or someone is conveniently and unexpectedly introduced by an author to resolve or advance a plot conflict. Aristotle didn’t recommend ‘em, but writers from Shakespeare to the script team of the Sopranos used ‘em. I side with Gentle Will and David Chase. Introducing Parka Man in the last pages of a novel to save our young hero fits the definition of a deus ex machina. I’m not saying this is a good thing or not-so-good thing or a polyanna thing. It is a manipulative thing, because it’s like a magician who gets us to look over here while the fuzzy bunny is over there. If deus es machinas weren’t useful story telling devices, authors wouldn’t use them. The Pistol and Death with dignity.-- Imagine you’re on Jeopardy and the category is modern fiction. Question is: Name a CM character who has no friends, shuns people he doesn’t know, sees everyone around him as a potential enemy, is brave, resourceful and tenacious, has principles which he is willing and does kill for…. and, oh, yes, our guy is NOT in The Road. You see the problem with Dad? Apart from being surrounded by cannibals, the man has issues. He loves his son but teaches him how to shoot himself. He vows to kill anyone who touches his son. Then, fearing the pistol may misfire, he considers bashing son’s cute little skull with a rock. He refuses to come to the aid of children, AARPies, people struck by lightning or dogs. He strips naked and leaves for dead another outcast who stole from them. I think you can say about the father what another character said about Captain Ahab, “Madness made him mad.” The son is the one who agitates for helping others, resists packing iron, resists replacing his own charitable instincts with his father’s disaster response tactics, and retains a sense of compassion – oh, yes, and is ultimately saved, if you take the ending literally. There’s a POV that the father’s situation gave him no choice in his responses, but Parka “deus ex machina” Man took a different course and his family is still standing and can even take in another castaway. The use of the deus ex machine does three things to wind up the TR plot: Dad’s sacrifices weren’t in vain; the son (at least temporarily) gets another chance; the reader who has imagined being in Dad’s situation throughout the book gets to re-evaluate the matter. How would you end it? -- Well, I’m not rying to rewrite TR. I’m trying to see clearly what the author says through the text. So my approach to answering such a Q would be to imagine what the author might say over a bottle of Jameson. CM might say -- This is a tightly-spun story of a worldwide (?) holocaust reduced to the lives of a father and a son. A more conventional ending would require more characters a/o more extensive development. My characters don’t even have names. So the deus ex machina worked. CM might continue – Developing the book by introducing additional characters who would interact with the father could turn this important character into something like an obsessive, paranoid Ahab, although he has much to be obsessive and paranoid about. CM might say that the sudden appearance of Parka Man isn’t a lot different than stumbling on a non-cannibal commune, though Dad might be a problem. And after a little more Jameson, CM might throw his well-thumbed copy of Moby Dick at my head, and explain, “Speaking of convenient and unexpected endings – how about Ishmael getting a ride on Queequeg’s coffin! And being picked up by the Rachel! Without becoming lunch for a shark! How’s them Deus Ex Machinas? Go bother Melville, and leave me alone, for God’s sake!” I’m not saying the DexM is bad, just that there is such a thing, it has an accepted definition, it’s commonly used, and it’s instructive to consider why it is used in a particular instance.

TR's deus ex machina	Clement	11/22/2008
Well, I always saw the arc of the novel as the movement of the man from a to b, wherein a = murder suicide and b= letting the son go on, no matter what. It's debatable whether we were prepped for the Parka Man or not, but I think there are enough clues that we were. I expect the movie will make this more obvious than the novel did, working with the same clues - but that's just my wishful expectations.

TR's deus ex machina	robj	11/22/2008
Imagine you’re on Jeopardy and the category is modern fiction. Question is: Name a CM character who has no friends, shuns people he doesn’t know, sees everyone around him as a potential enemy, is brave, resourceful and tenacious, has principles which he is willing and does kill for…. and, oh, yes, our guy is NOT in The Road. Alex, Who is Lester Ballard! I'll take the washer/dryer combo. Kevin, Thanks for your response and I certainly see your point of view. Parka man's appearance can seem terribly convenient. This may sound as weak as you believe the ending is, but for me Parka Man's appearance worked OK. Perhaps my disbelief was/is more easily suspendable than yours. But I accepted Parka Man and still think his arrival is within the realm of possibility. Stumbling onto the fully stocked bomb shelter could also be viewed as unlikely (though not in a deux ex machina way)...but I rolled with it since it is within the bounds of the possible... and stranger things happen in life and art every day. Just to show you that I'm not a complete McCarthy ringer, I would like to add that he has tested my disbelief elsewhere, such as in 'The Crossing' when Billy singlehandedly subdues the wolf then gets the wolf-on-a-leash to obediently tag along behind the most un-spookable horse in the West. Anyway, I did accept this wolf treatment and as I read along it seemed to become more plausible. Rob

TR's deus ex machina	glass	11/22/2008
>>>>>he has tested my disbelief elsewhere, such as in 'The Crossing' when Billy singlehandedly subdues the wolf then gets the wolf-on-a-leash to obediently tag along behind the most un-spookable horse in the West.<<<< Rob: I had an identical experience, but like you said "as I read along it seemed to become more plausible."

TR's deus ex machina	blackhiller	11/22/2008
In at least the technical sense, no, it's not really a deus ex machina, only so in the popular sense of the word. To be one, at least in anything approaching the classical sense, the appearance has to be "out of the blue." See Euripedes with _Medea_, for instance: there is absolutely nothing that prepares a reader or viewer for the appearance of the chariot that sweeps Medea away. That is what Aristotle decries. In fact, Aristotle is most critical of it, yes, but _not_ critical for those elements that are carefully prepared for by the author, which would not fit the definition. So it's not a matter of whether anyone here is using it as a negative term or not: it's that the term tends to be misapplied. Nah, can't give away those elements at this time, Peter--sorry. I think Clem may be on to some of the same things. Again, though I've studied and studied the one in particular, I still can't convince myself either way.

TR's deus ex machina	peterfranz	11/22/2008
Nice posts Kevin; well written and entertaining. As is so often the case this discussion says as much about the reader as it does about what is being read. From the opening lines I did not expect any outcome for ‘TR’ other than the one McCarthy gives us. That is not to say that other outcomes could not make as much aesthetic and moral sense, including outcomes wherein the child dies. And nor do I mean that I anticipated some kind of rescue or had any idea at all about how it might work in detail. But, that the story must conclude on a note that is moral and humane is suggested by the very title of the novel and also by the self-evident (to me anyway) idea that this journey has purpose. Man, boy, author and reader may not know what that purpose is and in that sense the journey is an act of compulsion but also, in some indefinable way, one of faith. If one accepts that much then parkaman is not a deus ex machina (to the extent that he is) but it’s very opposite, something and someone that is part of the very DNA of the novel. In fact I would go so far as to say that he is there at the end (new beginning) not by happy and convenient chance but by an ordering of circumstance that man and boy have set in train by the very act of embarking on their journey. They are on the road and, because they are, so is parkaman. To put all that differently one might think about how valid a piece this story would be were it to have ended in violent death or worse or its conclusion did not contain what many readers now see as a measure of hope. It seems to me that it would be nothing other than a nihilistic and cynical work of no value whatever. Further one might ask oneself if an author now in his seventies would wish to dedicate such a profoundly pessimistic work to his own son. I hope not, for both their sakes. And that is why, while I find myself agreeing with the thinking behind Chris’ post, I can’t agree with the conclusions. There is, I think, a sense in which McCarthy is being ironic (or as ironic as he gets anyway) but it is an irony directed at the reader rather than a function of the story as such. In terms of narrative, in the sense of what actually happens, the outcome of TR is no more or less valid than a number of possible conclusions, something that blackhiller and glass have differently said. But here, as so often, what McCarthy challenges is the reader’s preconceptions of how a story such as this should ‘go’; ideas which are themselves tied to spurious notions of ‘real’ or ‘true’ or ‘human nature’ or something. The Road is a very dark journey and though the light at the end is not exactly blinding that it is, none the less, something worth reaching for seems to be McCarthy’s point. But that is an effort individual readers have to make, we can’t expect McCarthy to do it for us. pf

TR's deus ex machina	mff8785	11/22/2008
I feel the virtues exemplified by the father and son in The Road (strength, goodness, a need for dignity, and love) provide the foundation of the novel, not death or survival of the characters; although I must admit that the father and son's will to survive is inspiring. The kid could still die, and I'd still know the father did the right thing throughout his journey in the extremely violent world of this novel. As Chris pointed out, the last paragraph shows how irrelevant and inconsequential the survival of the son may be. "The new spirit, therefore, sought for an Earthly resolution of the tragic dissonance. The hero, after being sufficiently tortured by fate, earned a well-deserved reward through a splendid marriage or tokens or divine favor. The hero had turned gladiator on whom, after he had been nicely beaten and covered with wounds, freedom was occasionally bestowed. The deus ex machina took the place of metaphysical comfort (Nietzsche-The Birth of Tragedy- Kauffman pg118). The virtues in the novel provide the "metaphysical" foundation for the reader. If we read the arrival of the Parkaman as the deus ex machina we are categorizing the virtues exemplified by the father as mere religion, fetish, or superstition. McCarthy in the words of Nietzsche is not a "new spirit"; metaphysical certainty plays a spectacular role in his stories.

TR's deus ex machina	Glass	11/22/2008
Keeping the pistol and the one bullet in mind, plus the talk about the boy perhaps being forced into committing suicide, it's a nice play on words or maybe just a neat coincidence when Parka Man says to the boy, "You'll have to take a shot." I'm glad he didn't have to do that. Peter

TR's deus ex machina	cdacus	11/23/2008
I agree with Mike that the virtues of the father are central to the narrative as a whole. The father's virtues are the classic Aristotelian virtues of the non-intellectual man, and they are the virtues which are disappearing in late Western modernity with the decline of the West. But the virtues of the non-intellectual man are not merely Western. After all, in the Bhagavadgita Krsna tells Arjuna that he must fight regardless of the consequences, without regard for the fruits of action. Not surprisingly, the fullest analysis of the problem of the deus ex machina in tragedy is given by Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics, wherein he extends and completes Aristotle's analysis in Poetics (realizing that we don't have the part of Aristotle's Poetics which dealt with comedy). Nietzsche, as per usual, is extremely one-sided and fails to recognize the depth of Socratic thought. Had Nietzsche paid careful attention to Socrates' complete discussion of tragedy in the Republic, he could not possibly have come to the conclusion that Medea was in any way Socratic, since the old man himself criticized the entire genre of tragedy as a plaything for women and boys (quite an Aristophanic view actually).

TR's deus ex machina	blackhiller	11/23/2008
Yes, back to some of the Eastern emanations of the novel. Duty. Violence, even, when it is the duty, and opposing duties and their and other paradoxes as truth. The almost utter elementalism (running throughout McCarthia) and anti-materialism. The suggestions of possible cycles (including the trout ending), and of the yin-yang. The going forths into the world: Buddha's four realizations, then the Great Going Forth. The "frictionless, like water" Tao, often mistranslated as "inaction" when it is action only as life comes to you as opposed to the ever-premeditated (suicide, here). Etc., etc., etc., including that which I keep refusing to broach at this time. In short, what I term "Transtheism," as well as other things.

TR's deus ex machina	awdang	11/23/2008
hey yall, as I'm sure many of you know, that quote about the 'moral arc of the universe' is from Martin Luther King Jr. It's a quote Obama has been playing with a bit, and even referenced slightly during his victory speech. For anyone who needs a goose-pimple moment, here's a short clip of King saying it in Birmingham: http://chronicle.com/blogs/footnoted/1479/the-arc-of-the-moral-universe-is-long-but-it-bends-toward-justice As far as the deux ex machina moment goes (a technique I find not necessarily off-putting, seeing as life is chock full of these sort of oddities; therefore the task of the writer merely being one of making us BELIEVE) I see it as McCarthy's distancing himself from his modernist roots, which for his legacy, I take to be a good thing. His inheritance from the modernists is clear in terms of technique, but there's a subtler inheritance there as well- the despair in his work, in their work. Bellow, in his Paris Review interview, talks about his own desperate need to shake off some of the horror which the modernists wanted to show us (and should have shown us, given their historical position). But to continually imagine the world as a place where the moral trajectory speeds ONLY towards towards hellish ruin and savagery, could be argued to be a reductive lie against the true nature of the world, which is complex, housing both savagery and kindness. Maybe McCarthy is sticking it to his predecessors here, saying, There are people who love and love well. Just my .02.

TR's deus ex machina	KevinM	11/23/2008
Thanks for your comments. It's interesting how people agree and yet don't. To me a plot that is perfectly symmetrical and in which each event leads to a proportional response is likely to produce a large, plodding book. It’s interesting to watch an author create one amazing event after another, eventually going so far out on a limb that some unexpected event is needed to bring it all together for a restart or a close. Hamlet, on ship and headed for his own death, is rescued by pirates and returned to Elsinore. Ishmael is dumped in the middle of the ocean and has to be -- in a few paragraphs -- maintained, rescued and returned home. A mortally wounded father and his son, surrounded by cannibals, have to be saved, each in his fashion. The authors reach into their tool boxes and pull out the tried and tested deus ex machina. Nothing wrong with that, I say. In the case of TR, I think readers are purposely misled by CM into idolizing the father. They overlook clear clues from CM that dad has flaws. From the beginning, dad divides the world into good guys and bad guys. There is a strong conflict between father and son as to how to treat other travelers. Just before the novel’s end, the son begs his father not to kill the bedraggled man who steals their shopping cart. This wretched man surrenders his weapon and pleads for his life, but the father leaves him in the road naked and shivering. (Dad relents and comes back, kind of like Llewelyn in NCFOM) Yes, dad is stoic, courageous and tenacious. Yet he's incomplete as an exemplar of the pagan or Christian virtues. So separating father and son through the sudden, unexpected appearance of a new character is the way CM pays respect to dad’s sacrifices, gets him out of the story and whisks the son off for another chance. Even Parka Man thinks the son may be “weirded out” by dad’s influence. But another ending would have been an injustice to the push of all that had gone before. P.S. Perhaps I should have followed protocol by introducing myself in an earlier post. Better late than never. Before I went over to the dark side, I was your humble assoc prof with a keen interest in how authors put together the art of fiction. I was surrounded by folks who saw lit as class warfare, or social criticism or history of ideas or whatever. But I was the one who read the last chapter first, the better to watch the book being built. I was told this wasn’t scholarly, and I decided that scholarship intruded too much on my other interests. I remain most interested in how writers put it together and how the different pieces join to make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. Just my preference, here, not an ideological statement. Thanks, again, and proceed.

TR's deus ex machina	Glass	10/17/2009
"The panther instantly satisfies the public's hunger for instant gratification of the body. The healthy panther has replaced the diseased figure in the cage..." (Efraim Sicher: The Semiotics of Hunger) Maybe the much-maligned Parkaman plays a similar role in The Road as the panther does at the end of Kafka's A Hunger Artist. Girard's comments about "semantic abstinence" on Kafka are also interesting when applied to McCarthy's stripped-down anorexic text of TR. The book as hungry and lean as its characters. Also some similarity perhaps with Kafka writing his own death.

TR's deus ex machina	KevinM	10/17/2009
>>>"semantic abstinence"<<< Haha. I like that. Mebbe the Irish Catholic in McC associated all the ash with Lent, hence the abstinence. The wonder is that the same author could produce both Blood Meridian and The Road. I still think Parkaman's timely appearance is just too damn convenient. I'm chomping at the bit to see how the movie handles Eli and Parkaman. Watched Rooster Cogburn last night, and I still think John Wayne would have made a helluva Parkaman. Love the way Wayne delivered lines like: "It's too late to stop 'em. It's not too late to hang 'em."

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