The Crossing Mccarthy Analysis

Throughout life, we go through tough moments where we are certain everything is lost. However, we always change from these experiences and grow to become new people with a new interpretation and understanding of the world. In a passage from The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy, the narrator describes a striking ordeal, in which a man is coping with the death of a she-wolf. Despite the cause of the wolf’s death being ambiguous, the dramatic experience has a vivid effect on the main character—causing him to change and grow into a new man by the end of the passage. McCarthy uses eloquent and expressive diction to create imagery, which gives the reader an understanding of the narrator’s experience, supplemented by spiritual references and setting changes, …show more content…
It is important to consider the setting—particularly the lighting, in which all of these events occur. In the second paragraph of the passage, a fire is created by the man so he can survive the night until dawn. In addition to the fire, we witness the protagonist transition from “...shivering in the cold and waiting for the dawn that he could find the place where he would bury the wolf” (25) to him closing his eyes and envisioning the wolf “running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her.” (46) The light of the fire, which he creates, in addition to his wait for dawn to come, represents hope for a new day. McCarthy uses lighting throughout the passage as a reflection of the protagonist’s current state of coping with the dead wolf, juxtaposing night and day, with the figurative death and life of his persona. Prior to falling sleep late at night, the man has absolutely no purpose—symbolizing the death of his existence; but upon waking up and visualizing the new light, he is a brand new person who has endured the complications of coping with the expiry of something he …show more content…
The first half of the passage, before the man falls asleep in front of the fire, the coyotes “[are] yapping along the hills to the south and they [are] calling from the dark shapes of the rimlands...where their cries [seem] to have no origin other than the night itself” (11) However, once the man awakes and experiences his resurrection, “the coyotes [clap] shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel.” (53) Very similarly to the darkness, the coyotes are commonly associated with death, since they are predators who kill in order to survive. The coyotes only howl before the man falls asleep, but once the man wakes up and experiences his vision with the wolf being alive, the coyotes stop their howling. He is no longer in fear of them—they are in fear of him. Radically changed as a result of the death, the man’s emotions are illustrated by the howling and the silence of the coyotes. He is no longer in fear of death and the absence of the wolf, he has embraced the death and has accepted the loss of something major in his life—knowing it is for the