The Crossing: A Literary Analysis
Man can easily feel miniscule in comparison to the grandeur of mother nature. Cormack McCarthy’s The Crossing details the emotions of the main character after losing his wolf, and it illustrates a dramatic dichotomy between mankind and nature. The excerpt’s inclusion of sacred language and drawn-out sentence structure concerning the burial of the wolf suggests that the experience was both solemn and awe-inspiring to the protagonist.
The reverent language directed toward the wolf express the main character’s increasing solidarity with the wolf and his surroundings. The man “cradled” the bleeding, dead wolf in his arms and gently “lowered” her to the ground. The nurturing diction implies that the main character …show more content…
The run-on sentence in lines 15-24, “He got the fire and… fear of their own doing”, is a microcosm of the overall development of the protagonist. Just as the sentence progresses from being repetitious to abstract, so does the main character grow throughout the passage as someone who is ritualistically performing an act to someone to has an enlightenment about the beauty and grandeur of nature. The polysyndeton linking ideas in this sentence expresses how the man goes through the motions, ceremoniously cleansing the wolf and setting up shelter. Furthermore, the lack of punctuation in lines 41-48, “The eye turned to the fire… in the night before her”, expresses the protagonists stream of consciousness from a third person omniscient point of view. The omission of punctuation transitions the passage from the rhythm of the surrounding environment to the cadence of the man’s imagination as he envisions the wolf racing through the wild. The final sentence of the passage in lines 62-65, “But which cannot be held… the world cannot lose it”, is yet again another example of polysyndeton and extended sentence structure. This run-on sentence structure effectively communicates the passion the man gains for nature as a whole from this one experience. The sentence concludes the passage on a
Man can easily feel miniscule in comparison to the grandeur of mother nature. Cormack McCarthy’s The Crossing details the emotions of the main character after losing his wolf, and it illustrates a dramatic dichotomy between mankind and nature. The excerpt’s inclusion of sacred language and drawn-out sentence structure concerning the burial of the wolf suggests that the experience was both solemn and awe-inspiring to the protagonist.
The reverent language directed toward the wolf express the main character’s increasing solidarity with the wolf and his surroundings. The man “cradled” the bleeding, dead wolf in his arms and gently “lowered” her to the ground. The nurturing diction implies that the main character …show more content…
The run-on sentence in lines 15-24, “He got the fire and… fear of their own doing”, is a microcosm of the overall development of the protagonist. Just as the sentence progresses from being repetitious to abstract, so does the main character grow throughout the passage as someone who is ritualistically performing an act to someone to has an enlightenment about the beauty and grandeur of nature. The polysyndeton linking ideas in this sentence expresses how the man goes through the motions, ceremoniously cleansing the wolf and setting up shelter. Furthermore, the lack of punctuation in lines 41-48, “The eye turned to the fire… in the night before her”, expresses the protagonists stream of consciousness from a third person omniscient point of view. The omission of punctuation transitions the passage from the rhythm of the surrounding environment to the cadence of the man’s imagination as he envisions the wolf racing through the wild. The final sentence of the passage in lines 62-65, “But which cannot be held… the world cannot lose it”, is yet again another example of polysyndeton and extended sentence structure. This run-on sentence structure effectively communicates the passion the man gains for nature as a whole from this one experience. The sentence concludes the passage on a