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The road by mccormick5/22/2023 Speaking of writers who have imitated him, he says, “You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks, and write in such a way as to guide people as to who’s speaking.” Otherwise, confusion reigns.Ĭareful McCarthy reader Oprah says she “saw a colon once” in McCarthy’s prose, but she never encountered a semicolon. McCarthy stresses that this way of writing dialogue requires particular deliberation. In his Oprah interview, he says MacKinlay Kantor was the first writer he read who left them out. So what “weird little marks” does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief summary of his stated rules for punctuation: I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. Joyce’s influence dominates, and in discussion of punctuation, McCarthy stresses that his minimalist approach works in the interest of maximum clarity. But in his very rare 2008 televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy cites two other antecedents: James Joyce and forgotten novelist MacKinlay Kantor, whose Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Cormac McCarthy has been-as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Tree, dubbed him-a “disciple of William Faulkner.” He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I’d always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well.
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