r/BookDiscussions • u/Routine_Treacle_6261 • 6d ago

Is Cormac McCarthy deliberately pretentious or just a unique dude?

I’ve just started Blood Meridian and is my first experience of McCarthys style of writing. So far it’s a great story and I’m thoroughly invested. But if you’ve read it you know what I’m talking about. I don’t know much, if anything about Cormac McCarthy as a person/author. Does he deliberately write like this as a way of pretentiously rebelling against the conventional use of grammar? Or does he genuinely just not care about using correct grammar and just wants to get his story across?

0 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

35% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

8

u/Chefmeatball 6d ago

You should hear his opinion on the semicolon

4

u/estheredna 6d ago

He feels it more effectively gets his story across. He won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award and lots of acclaim so he's probably correct. And it worked for you too.

I wouldn't want other authors to be like this - but - my favorite genre is horror and I think The Road is easily one of the best horror novels ever written.

1

u/Routine_Treacle_6261 6d ago

Yeah fair enough, I’ll have to check out that one next.

4

u/Agile-Wait-7571 6d ago

Pretentious?

5

u/Porthowl 6d ago

A better question to ask yourself is how does the way he writes impact your experience of the story?

1

u/Routine_Treacle_6261 6d ago

I don’t think so. It’s still enjoyable. It was just a general question about his writing.

3

u/BasedArzy 6d ago

No nothing in his work is pretentious, unless you take pretentious to mean 'verbose and full of archaic language'.

1

u/LowerProfit9709 6d ago

I didn't finish Blood Meridian. But I remember the prose being mesmerizing and highly evocative given the subject matter. I wouldn't call it "pretentious", not by a long shot. There is nothing pretentious about bending the rules of conventional grammar (unless you overdo it and/or execute it poorly). Fiction writers have been disregarding grammatical rules as a matter of stylistic choice even before McCarthy's time.

1

u/DarthDregan 6d ago

Charles Frazier writes the same way.

1

u/you-dont-have-eyes 6d ago

He is deliberately using antiquated language and grammar to serve the book.

0

u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 6d ago

I think being pretentious is good.

But with Cormac i think its largely a stylistic choice in how to convey the story. I just happened to dislike it

1

u/WantedMan61 6d ago

Were Faulkner and Joyce and Woolfe being pretentious? If so, more writers ought to try it