Breaking the Rules: The Unconventional Punctuation of The Road Margaret Grace Roper College

If a student tells his or her teacher that adhering to grammatical rules proves unnecessary to acceptable writing, the teacher would in all likelihood balk at the student’s claim and continue reinforcing the need for proper punctuation. If someone asked Cormac McCarthy about the necessity of punctuation, he would probably respond the same way he did in a 2008 interview with Oprah Winfrey: “There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly, you shouldn’t have to punctuate." McCarthy renounces common punctuation rules in his novel The Road in order to impart the novel’s underlying messages in a simplistic style.

McCarthy’s greatest deviation from conventional punctuation rules exists in his lack of quotation marks in dialogue. In one instance, McCarthy writes, “Can I ask you something? he said. / Yes. Of course. / Are we going to die? / Sometime. Not now. / And we’re still going south” (10). McCarthy’s decision to abstain from quotation marks heavily influences the way the reader interprets the tone. Withholding quotations gives the text a bare appearance, strikingly similar to the novel’s barren setting. The dialogue serves as another channel the reader uses to grasp the desolation of...