This is a 40-minute essay I wrote for Advanced Placement Literature, and despite writing this months ago I still remember what a strong connection I felt to the passage and how important this analysis felt to me.

Death: More than Just a Stopped Heart

Sometimes, a dead animal isn’t just a dead animal, it holds an emotional weight of the world. It is a mind-blowing experience for someone who’s heart was close to it. The speaker in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing is having just that experience. The speaker describes a scene that was simple, yet amazingly dramatic. McCarthy achieves this successful portrayal of a huge impact on the main character with a variety of syntax (extremely long and short sentences), a description of the wolf that shows its meaningfulness that involves repetition and mysterious imagery, and the repetitive nature of the sentences that make the passage seem instructional, as if the main character’s mind was numbed to the death he not only experienced but took care of afterwards.

The author used bold, short sentences to emphasize parts he thought were important, and long, bordering-on-frantic sentences also to catch the reader’s attention. Take the third sentence, for example: “His trousers were stiff with blood” (lines 4-5). This declarative statement makes the readers wonder: whose blood? Who is hurt? It’s likely that they thought of a human, but it was a wolf, emphasizing the importance of this creature. To contrast, one sentence spans from line 15 to 24 (“He got the…their own doing”). This sentence describes the main character setting up camp and taking notice of what’s around him, something that shouldn’t be a big deal but is, because the experience is dramatic. In addition, the character was “waiting for dawn so that he could find the place where he could bury the wolf” (lines 26-27). Elongating sentences makes the character seemed rushed, which he is because he wants to get the emotional experience of burying the wolf over with. 

The wolf in The Crossing was described in ways that are normally used to describe people, highlighting the importance of this creature. The repetition of “blood” emphasized the gruesomeness of the wolf’s appearance. The character can’t take his mind off of just how much blood there is, but anyone who hunts or lives in the wild long enough should be used to situations such as this. He also couldn’t get over how “stiff” the wolf was, that is was really dead. The wolf’s deadness was juxtaposed with the lively mountains surrounding the main character and the creatures that reside there. The setting is mysterious, especially in the night, with “dark shapes” and coyotes whose “cries seemed to have no origin other than the night itself” (lines 12-14). There are also several mentions of “flowers that feed on flesh,” revealing that nature is beautiful, but also harsh, a lesson the character learned from a beautiful creature being killed in a gruesome way. The “flower” is more than the whole story, it is “terror” (line 65), yet “the world can’t lose it” (line 66). The final sentence in the passage is so important, as it shows the wolf and it’s home as a reality, not a fantasy. 

An unusually high amount of sentences in this passage started with “He,” describing what the main character was doing. This simple method of writing sounds mechanical, as if he is putting the least amount of thought into what he is doing as possible so he can go on with his life unchanged. It is only towards the second half of the passage that this trend is broken as the main character breaks down. He did not bargain that burying the wolf would be such an emotional hardship, and he fought it off by numbing his brain to what he must do. He broke, with the help of the blood and the stiffness of its body and the mystery of the night. Once again, the final sentence is a run-on, because these thoughts are coming to him all at once and they can’t stop and the event means too much to him. He loses himself in his surroundings, or does he find himself? This emotional upheaval meant something huge to the main character, the disposal of an animal taught him something that built up throughout the passage that was finally revealed in the end: The real world, out in the wild, can be heartbreaking for humans, but it is the way it is, it can be no other way.

Writing a passage as emotionally loaded as this one in The Crossing can be difficult, but like Cormac McCarthy has shown, it can be done with the help of varying syntax, a larger than life description of the wolf that is to be buried, and a change in sentence type from beginning to end as the character’s emotional numbness gives way to glaring realizations that are too much to handle at once. He realizes that romanticization of nature show only one half of the story, the half that people want to see because they can separate themselves from the other half: the death, the struggle for power, the suffering. The passage is telling the truth about the wilderness: there is no good or bad, just dead or alive.