An Analysis Of The Rhetoric Narrative Of Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road

As one of the most famous novelists in the contemporary American literature,Cormac McCarthy is honored as the sole heir after Ernest Heimingway and William Faulkner in America.McCarthy’s novels have a broad subject range,including south gothic novel,western novel,and post-apocalyptic novel.His creative style is also distinctive.In terms of creative themes,his novels are soaked with senses of coldness and solemn,just as existential literature and apocalyptic literature.His main characters are lonely losers,criminals and vagrants.As for writing style,his novels usually have no plot,no normal punctuation,and are filled with strange words,so he is honored as the heir of Faulkner and Joyce.The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel created in 2006 and it is McCarthy’s tenth novel known as a "cruel poetics".The novel won Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Best of the James Tait Black in 2007.The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic world,telling a story of a father and his son who head for south to search for a chance to survive.In this novel,post-apocalyptic,existentialism,the relationship between father and son,ethical explanation and so on have been deeply discussed by scholars both at home and abroad.Thus the paper will explore this novel from the perspective of Booth’s Rhetoric Narrative.The first chapter will briefly introduce the author and this novel as well as the research background at home and abroad.Chapter two will trace the appearance and development of the idea of Rhetoric Narrative,explaining Booth’s Rhetoric Narrative in details.Based on Booth’s Rhetoric Narrative theories,this paper will explore The Road’s Rhetoric Narrative in three aspects.Chapter Three will focus on The Road’s narrative points of view.First,the paper will explain points of view in fiction from the rhetoric perspective,than try to analyze points of view of The Road.And the paper will explain the points of view of The Road in three points,the first-person point of view and its rhetoric effects;the third-person limited omniscient point of view and its rhetoric effects;the stream of consciousness and its rhetoric effects.Chapter Four will concentrate on implied author of The Road.Based on Booth’s implied author theories,this paper will further discuss Booth’s another two conceptions,dramatic narrator and reliable narrator to explore the implied author in The Road.Following with the multiple narrative modes,the paper tries to seek out how the author controls the distance between his implied author and the character and the distance between his implied author and the reader as well.The final aspect is about the morality pursue of rhetoric narrative.Based on Booth’s interpretation of morality,the paper tries to explain the three moral themes in The Road:the selfless paternal love;human’s struggle for survival;human’s insistence on a bright future.Through the narrative of these three themes,the author brings us a positive value,which produces a good social effect and ultimately the author achieves his writing goal—moral and humanity concern.