Craft Analysis for Packet Three

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.