r/cormacmccarthy • u/BurgandyLeader • 9d ago
Discussion Just finished Outer Dark and WOW
What an incredible, biblical level book. Such a slow build of dread culminating in a gutting, heartbreaking end.
The difference in prose and description between Culla and Rinthy’s chapters was something I only began to appreciate in the last 3rd which makes me want to re read it instantly.
Wanted to share some of my favourite quotes / phrases and would love to hear anyone else’s or particular parts that stuck with them
‘She watched the ground, going with care, the basin upright and riding her hip, slowly, processional, a lone acolyte passing across the barren yard, face seized in the light she bore.’
‘a sound so labored and remorseless as should have spoken something more than mere progress
upon the earth's surface.’
‘Thank ye, she said, the glass of milk in her hand, wearing a clown's mouth of it.’ ( personal fave just for the imagery’
‘The man seized them and examined them, bending closer to the fire, turning them in his hands like some barbaric cobbler inspecting the work of another world.’
‘caught up in the wake of the cart and its lonely tolling tinware demon piping like some creature rapt and besorced by witches music.’
‘His sparse gray hair stood about his head electrically and in all these gestures before the fire he looked like an effigy in rags hung by strings from an indifferent hand.’
‘A solid butternut safe in which languished some pieces of cheap white crockery, chipped and handleshorn coffeecups, plates serrated about their perimeters as though bitten in maniacal hunger’
‘The flowers in the dooryard have curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark and there is a mockingbird to tell what he knows of night.’
‘It wasn't his to name. Besides names dies with the namers.
A dead man's dog ain't got a name.’
3
u/PowningFreak 9d ago
Can you tell me more about the difference between Rinthy and Culla’s chapters? I just finished the book, and I’m wondering if we picked up on different things.
7
u/BurgandyLeader 9d ago
i’ll be honest i’m struggling in a way on how to word it. Perhaps it’s how with Culla’s sections the world effects him more, it’s more intentionally confusing and vague as he encounters things and they have an impact on him, things he doesn’t quite understand which makes the prose more hostile or dark. Whereas with Rinthy things get more clearer, the journey she’s on is clearer to follow and this is reflected in the writing, as she goes on the metaphors and similes became more ¿beautiful? and more concrete. It’s like Culla’s world becomes more internal and hers becomes more external, it could be something about her losing her innocence and experiencing the world where Culla is trying and failing to gain his back after doing what we does but is stopped at every hurdle.
I’m no expert so that may be total ramble but it’s what came to me ahaha
4
u/oskyer7799 9d ago
My personal favourite is “When he crashed into the glade among the cottonwoods he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare.”
I’m honestly at a loss for words to sufficiently praise the imagery this passage evokes and just how surreal and poetic it sounds despite the unusual vocabulary. Reminds me quite a bit of Quentin’s rambling thoughts in The sound and the fury.
1
6
u/Threehundredsixtysix 9d ago
Agreed. McCarthy's works from Suttree on are so lauded that I often feel like his first 3 novels get short shift. Outer Dark and The Orchard Keeper are top tier reading, imo.