I'm not sure if this qualifies as a craft analysis or it its just glorified literary vomit, but I was rather proud of how this came together (not so proud of the ending) and thought I would share it here for those that are curious as to what I'm talking about when I go on about craft analyses for my MFA. This is a longer one than I usually submit. We have the option of doing two smaller ones (each one analyzing a craft element of one specific book, story, or poem) or one larger one that typically entails two or more sources. Please excuse the completely uninspired title.
Narrative Structure
Sets the Mood
There is a
lot to be said for setting the right mood.
A theatre does it via a lowering of the house lights and the sensuous
drawing back of the proscenium curtain.
A young suitor might set the mood with music and flowers and carefully
chosen words that even Cyrano himself would be proud to take credit for. In a business meeting the mood depends upon
the line graphs – that the line for profit be at an incline and the line for
losses be at a decline – and the colors and geometric shapes that make up the
slides of the accompanying power point presentation. When it comes to novels, setting the mood is
just like getting ready for a play, gearing up for a date, or laying out the
plans for the quarterly report. The
curtains are drawn, the table is set, and the slides begin showing scene after
scene.
In Richard
Matheson’s I am Legend and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the mood,
that of melancholy and irrepressible anxiety, is established not only by the
visual and emotional cues of the setting within the text, but also through the
narrative structure of the book itself.
Just as the venue for an off-Broadway show can alter the mood for that
night’s performance, so, too, might the chapter format and intermittent white
space affect the mood of a novel.
Through examining the similarities of mood and the differences of
structure in I am Legend and The Road it becomes clear that there
is more than one way to engage the audience in the suspense of a dystopian
landscape.
Though
there are many differences in Matheson’s and McCarthy’s stories, the internal
motif of despair and salvage remain the same.
Both stories are notably dystopian and share themes of isolation and
perseverance. I am Legend
constantly reminds us of Robert Neville’s solitude as he barricade’s himself
within his house every single night. The
loneliness continues throughout the day as well as evident from such details
as, “On both sides of him the houses stood silent,
and against the curbs the cars were parked, empty and dead,” and "He
couldn't walk to Santa Monica,
so he had to try using one of the many cars parked around the
neighborhood. But most of them were inoperative for one reason or
another: a dead battery, a clogged fuel pump, no gasoline, flat tires”
(Matheson 24, 49). In The Road,
the man and the boy encounter the same sort of desolation: “On the
outskirts of the city they came to a supermarket. A few old cars in the trashstrewn parking
lot. They left the cart in the lot and
walked the littered aisles. In the
produce section in the bottom of the bins they found a few ancient runner beans
and what looked to have once been apricots, long since dried to wrinkled
effigies of themselves [...] By the door were two softdrink machines that had
been tilted over into the floor and opened with a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works
of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal
cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly
and sat looking at a Coca Cola” (McCarthy 23).
By demonstrating seclusion using elements that the audience is familiar
with – empty streets, broken down cars, a supermarket, fruit, and cola – the
authors set up an inescapable mood of loss.
Though similar settings and imagery help to invoke visceral responses,
it is the differences in structure laid out by Matheson and McCormack that take
the mood of their respective works to a whole new level.
Matheson’s
piece, I am Legend, is highly organized in its structure. The novel, which is less than 200 pages in
length, consists of twenty-one chapters and is divided into four parts. The chapters are
numbered and many include partitions of whitespace which indicate skips in
location, time, or situation. I am
Legend is extremely segmented and orderly when compared to the fluidity of
McCormack's The Road which has no chapter breaks or headings of any
kind. The first page of Matheson’s highly
structured novel is set up as follows:
PART ONE: January 1976
Chapter One
On those cloudy days, Robert
Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets
before he could get back (Matheson 13).
The novel continues along this
format informing the audience of the entire scope of the timeline: PART TWO:
March 1976, Chapter Six; PART THREE:
June 1978, Chapter Fifteen; and PART
FOUR: January 1979, Chapter Twenty (Matheson
49, 119, 157). This layout is not that
unusual, but when compared to McCarthy’s piece, it becomes a generous point of
reference providing two numerical place marks (part and chapter) as well as a
sense of temporal location. The opening
for The Road gives us none of these things. We turn the title page and find a modicum of
white space followed by “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of
the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights
dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone
before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world"
(McCarthy 3).
While
I am Legend flushes out each part with approximate dates, The Road
infuses the text with random clues as to how long the world has been covered in
ash and how long the man and the boy have been traveling through it together. Matheson’s
novel draws clear lines, segregating
flashbacks into chapters all their own, using transitional phrases to encompass
reverie, and also employing cliffhanger-like resolutions to each segment as a
way to propel the story onward while augmenting suspense. I am Legend is told in
a way that cues the audience into what is happening but keeps them guessing at
what is going to happen next.
"The
dog looked up at him with its dulled, sick eyes and then its tongue faltered
out and licked roughly and moistly across the palm of Neville's hand.
Something broke in Neville's
throat. He sat there silent while tears ran slowly down his cheeks.
In a week the dog was dead” (Matheson
110)
"He
stood breathing heavily, looking at her [Ruth’s] frightened face. His
throat moved slowly as he remembered the shock of waking up and thinking she
was Virge.
Abruptly he dropped her arm and turned
away. And he'd though the past was dead. How long did it take for
the past to die?" (Matheson 149).
In McCarthy’s novel, however, the
use of white space between each and every paragraph gives the story a dreamlike delivery which adds to the sense of helplessness and loss
of control. The audience has to question
what is real, what is flashback, what is happening chronologically, and what is
a dream.
“They entered the drawingroom. The shape of a carpet beneath the silty
ash. Furniture shrouded in sheeting. Pale squares on the walls where paintings
once had hung. In the room on the other
side of the foyer stood a grand piano.
Their own shapes sectioned in the thin and water glass of the window
there. They entered and stood
listening. They wandered through the
rooms like skeptical housebuyers. They
stood looking out through the tall windows at the darkening land” (McCarthy
206).
“He woke in the night and lay listening. He couldnt remember where he was. The thought made him smile. Where are we? he said.
What is it,
Papa?
Nothing. We’re okay.
Go to sleep.
We’re going
to be okay, arent we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing
bad is going to happen to us.
That’s
right.
Because
we’re carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.
In the morning a cold rain was falling. It gusted over the car even under the
overpass and it danced in the road beyond.” (McCarthy 83)
Note the white space after the last line of dialogue and
note the dialogue itself. There are no
quotation marks around the spoken words and even certain contractions (arent
and couldnt) lack the apostrophes that make them contractions in the first
place. The disintegration of structure
adds to anxiety. Glaring errors in
spelling, interesting combinations of words such as ‘drawingroom,’ ‘sodamachines,’
and ‘housebuyers’ disrupt the audience’s absorption. These things plus a lack of traditional
grammar (quotation marks) add to the overall sensation of weaving between
dreams and reality, the past and the present.
Another
contrast between these two novels is the application of speaker tags. Interestingly enough, The Road which
has a minimum of two characters at all times, rarely uses speaker tags, while I
am Legend, with its almost exclusive one-man cast, uses speaker tags
freely. This is a small thing and yet it
is another way in which structure can affect the mood. In the former novel, the lack of tags makes
the words ephemeral and fleeting and adds to the sense of loss; in the latter
one, the inclusion of speaker tags makes it all the more obvious just how lonely
Robert Neville truly is.
Thumbing
through these books, one can see how the physical layout mirrors the internal
struggles of these novels, inviting the audience to feel the desperation and
the hopelessness that Matheson and McCarthy create in their respective
worlds. Matheson’s novel centers on one
man’s perseverance through continual maintenance of his home. Hammer, nails, generator, water tank,
industrial freezer and a locking garage are essential for Neville’s survival,
and this obsession with organization – though not necessarily cleanliness – is
depicted by the careful composition of the chapters and parts. The fact that the chapters are fairly brief
helps to break up the monotony of the dreary cycle of ‘repair house, kill
vampires, barricade self indoors, and repeat’ that Neville lives every day. In The Road, the main characters
follow an old beat up map trying desperately to make it to the coast even
though they have no idea what will happen when they get there. The structure, just like their path, is
twisting, unrelenting (no chapter breaks), and filled with rest stops (white
space). The frequent use of white space breaks
up the action and chops up the scenes until we are left with a bread crumb
trail through a thick forest where it’s only too easy to go in circles. This is perfect for the McCarthy novel.
In these
novels, the narrative structure not only builds and enhances the mood
throughout the story, but it also compliments the endings. The structure of the Matheson novel is one
that clings to order, which frustrates and exhausts the audience because how
can a dystopian vampire novel ever end with any sense of order? Yet, with Neville’s death at the end of the
story, it becomes clear that order will indeed be maintained and while there is
a sense that it isn’t fair for him to have to die, there is also relief in that
things can only get better. The novel
concludes with:
“A coughing chuckle filled his throat. He turned and
leaned against the wall while he swallowed the pills. Full circle, he
thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle.
A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable
fortress of forever.
I
am legend" (Matheson 170).
By the end the audience has run the gamete of emotions right
alongside Neville and the mood of anxiety and frustration disperses into the
inevitability of two simple words: full circle.
The Road offers a very similar ending yet a very different
conclusion for the mood. While in I
am Legend, the anxiety ends with
Neville’s death, in McCarthy’s tale, the man’s death serves only to prolong
that anxiety as now his son, the boy, must carry on without him. There is no peace for the audience and the
mood of unease augments as the boy joins up with a new group of people. It is generally assumed that this new group,
this family, is composed of honorable human beings, but the world they live in
is still submerged in utter chaos where horror, rape, death, and cannibalism
potentially wait around every corner. "Of a
thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the
deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of
mystery," marks the esoteric and foreboding conclusion to the story,
but not the conclusion of the fearful mood (McCarthy 287).
It
was with great insight that these authors used the structure to manipulate the
audience’s feelings. What better way to
illustrate the extremes of careful organization and preventative maintenance or
the complete lack thereof? Both Matheson
and McCarthy were able to set very dark and upsetting moods for their novels
and a huge part of their success stems from how they
presented their tales. If they had
structured their novels differently, would they still have been as triumphant? There is no certain answer for that question
but consider this: the perfect venue does not make for the perfect play and the
perfect date can take place while trapped inside a light-flickering, broken
elevator car. It isn’t the structure
alone that makes or breaks the mood of a piece; it is how the author uses the
structure to accent, reaffirm, and illustrate the text that makes narrative
structure a useful tool in the arsenal of craft.
Works Cited:
Matheson, Richard. I
Am Legend. New York:
ORB, 1995. Print.
McCarthy, Cormac. The
Road. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print.
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