Posts Tagged ‘Structure’

LITERATURE: 100 Years – Grounding & Narrative Structure

Monday, September 19th, 2005

One thing I have noticed in this book is that Marquez chooses his words for a purpose.  As I’ve posted before, the word "begonia" struck me the first time it was used, and then I realized it appeared several times later in the story.  It did have meaning, and yet without explanation, one would notice it for its importance right from the start.

And with all the reminders of Aureliano’s facing the firing squad, my picking up of the one mention of Arcadio instead of Aureliano was looked upon as a possible printing or translation error.  Bud Parr was correct in stating that he did not believe it was.  Arcadio did indeed face and succumb to this end.

So Marquez, in the midst of a complicated braiding of people and generations in a moving structure of time, has succeeded in bringing it all together without the use of traditional linear time alone.

Nice.

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LITERATURE: Suttree/Imagery & Structure

Saturday, July 2nd, 2005

How’s this for imagery: 

"They crossed a pasture where grackles blue and metallic in the sun were turning up dried cowpats for the worms beneath and they went on past the back side of a junklot with the sun wearing hard upon them and upon the tarpaper roof of the parts shack and upon the endless fenders and lids of wrecked cars that lay curing paintlorn in the hot and weedy reeks."

Now "they" is Suttree and Reese–a family man who talked Suttree into following him downriver with promises of great wealth from mussel pearls, which didn’t quite pan out–and they are making their way back home early on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night filled with booze and whorin’. 

Can’t you just feel their achin’ heads and wayward walkin’? 

One of McCarthy’s techniques, as I see it, is to set the pace of an event and give it its import and meaning by sentence length and punctuation–or lack thereof.  The above is truly a run-on sentence (and I love McCarthy for it!) unbroken by commas and yet the mouthful is still just enough to read without becoming tiresome.  The necessary breaths of the reader are limited to the reader–McCarthy doesn’t tell us to stop before each "and" unless we need to.  And, if we don’t need to, the pace we keep is exactly the same as that of Suttree and Reese as they weave their way home.

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