How Would YOU Feel?

            In James Wood’s How Fiction Works he is greatly in favor of an author exercising the “free indirect style.” His perception of how an author should write a book is in correlation with McCarthy’s approach in The Road. The entire book is written in third person; in fact, it never even mentions the names of the main characters. McCarthy never tells us what emotion the dialogues are spoken in or the emotion that it is conveyed in. One must take into account the setting and structure of the scene to make an educated guess about how the characters are feeling. The Road leaves a great deal of room for the reader to use their imagination and further build the characters for themselves.

            It is true that in any book numerous readers will see the characters differently; however, with McCarthy’s approach the readers could have such distinctive thoughts about the character that they are unrecognizable to one another. Saumya said in her blog, “Throughout the book as a reader I never felt fully connected to the Man or Boy because I was not always completely sure of what they were feeling, a lot of the assumptions had to be made by me from what I think they would have reacted. McCarthy even during conversations always kept it simple, and never added a “happily said” , etc. I think he wanted to leave lots of room for the reader to decide.” (http://saumya22.wordpress.com/)

            I completely agree with what she says, whilst reading the book I was never sure of how the characters felt. Moreover, I think this style of writing is what made The Road such a delightful read. By leaving so much room for interpretation up to the reader, one can decided for themselves how they would’ve felt under The Man and The boys situation. This book touches the reader at a personal level; it employs them to put themselves in The Man’s shoes and imagine their reaction under the same circumstances.

            As long as you don’t get carried away with “Free indirect style” it can be used to great advantage and force the reader to develop the characters themselves.