Cormac Mccarthy The Crossing The Narrator Analysis

In the passage from Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing the narrator describes a traumatic incident that happened to a wolf, and the impact it had on the main character. McCarthy’s literary techniques he uses to help show the impact of the experience: is imagery, tone, mood, and figurative language. The impact of the experience is sad but uplifting, watching nature shut down due to the fact an animal had died, similar to how people shut down in a real funeral.
Throughout this piece there is a lot of detail used to describe incidents that happened to the wolf and the main character. Imagery is the key technique that McCarthy used to describe these incidents. McCarthy uses distinct detail to describe what the wolf looked and felt once they found her dead. The wolf was described as, “stiff and cold and her fur was bristly”(McCarthy line 7), this helps readers imagine what the wolf looked like to the main character. The narrator describes the noises she hears by saying, “Coyotes were yapping along the hill”(McCarthy lines 10-11). Another example the narrator uses is when he says, “he touched the cold and perfect teeth”(McCarthy line 41), and when he

The tone of this passage is very gloomy with the ways he describes how the wolf looked and felt. The tone is also depressing when he says, “he closed his eyes then could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight”(McCarthy line 46), this point shows the wolf was innocent and never did wrong, which makes the impact of her death truly depressing. The mood of the passage is created by the past tense the author uses to describe each traumatic event that happened. The feeling I get while reading this is sad and mournful because the wolf not only meant a lot to the main character but to nature itself. Tone and mood are similar in meaning but they both help in expressing the impact the wolves death left on