Punctuation.

          As I began reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy I became very bored with the story right off the bat. I could not understand why McCarthy would leave out important formatting things such as apostrophes and quotation marks. The book seemed to pick up some as I read but it was hard to follow because there are no chapters so when the weather or setting changes it is difficult to notice which caused me to have to go back and reread some of the pages so I would not be so lost.

          I went to class and still sat quite in my dislike for this book. We began to discuss The Road and a group of students got up in class and began to answer questions our teacher has assigned. As we started looking over and answering the questions I started to see the reasons for McCarthy’s format. When the class came to the question “Why do you think McCarthy leaves out apostrophes and quotation marks? What is the effect upon the reader?” I was intrigued to see what the group had to say. One of the group members stepped up and said that what they believed McCarthy’s reason for doing this was to give the reader an idea and sense of confusion and feeling lost. Without punctuation road signs we are unable to know exactly what is going on and what the characters are feeling. If there are no forms of punctuation we cannot see the pauses, the sadness in a voice or anything, we are lost. This just hit me and I began to think “WOW!” I have never seen punctuation viewed that way before and when he said that I was blown away to see that McCarthy did just that, the reader was able to relate to the characters.

          I can say that I will never look at punctuation the same way ever again. I think that we lose that aspect or importance of grammar and punctuation at times and take it for granted. This book has taken on a whole new look to me. As I began to read part two of The Road I began to look deeper in the book for more meaning and symbolism. Never again will I take advantage of punctuation.