Rhetoric Study

You'd be astonished at how much one can pull from a paragraph.

Page 54, Cormac McCarthy's The Road:

"No list of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you."

If "whoa" was not the first thing that popped into your head, I pity you.

First of all, please take note of the grammatical structure of the sentences. In my eyes, this is direct representation of a train of thought. A lot of fractures, a lot of pauses, a lot of things that don't technically flow, but seem right because they're representative of the same dysfunctionality we experience in each syntactical lapse within our own patterns.

Secondly, take note of the way each phrase builds on the preceding phrases, in three segments. The first segment starts with "no" and ends with the second "later". The second segment begins with "all" and ends with "ashes", and the third is the remainder. Each segment displays a flowing process, and is then cut rather harshly by the next segment. Overall they form a complete point, each SEGMENT building onto the next, like the individual sentences or phrases build within the segment. So each segment builds up a partial point, and the entire paragraph contains the entirety of his point.

The point, by the way, is that nothing of this life matters anymore. Beautiful things are born within pain and despair, and the father judges that this level of pain and despair (you know, apocalypse and whatnot) was great enough to warrant the birth of something equal in magnitude but opposite in nature: his son.