i’m a little late for this conversation. but i’m writing an essay for AP lang about The Road and I can tell you my opinion on his lack of apostrophes. he did not do it to be “cool”. he did it to convey that in a world the has no hope there are no rules.

yes I completely agree. I’m an English major at Berkeley in my third year and I am actually writing a paper (like a quiz) right now about how his usage of contractions further the “positives” in the story. Nothing in this novel is random. It all has a purpose, and it demands to be read in a very structural way, with your eyes wide open and a dictionary at your side. I hope you all really enjoy it!

“Postmodernist texts often deal with the instability of our modern world and The Road, with its lack of punctuation and grammar rules, linguistically enacts the breakdown of societal structures. McCarthy?s form is minimalist as he uses only periods, commas, question marks, and the occasional apostrophe. His use of the last of these punctuations is probably the most interesting and revealing. In the text, McCarthy uses many negative contractions like dont, didnt, couldnt, wouldnt, and shouldnt without putting an apostrophe, meanwhile he does in his positive contractions, like that?s, we?re, you?re, we?ll, he?ll, and there?s. Though the presence of apostrophes might be something a reader easily overlooks, it has a lot to say about the nature of language and its presence in a post-apocalyptic world. To understand this idea, one must first think about the significance of an apostrophe and ask the question, what difference does it make? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an apostrophe is the sign (?) used to indicate the omission of a letter or letters when words are combined (OED, def.). We, as readers, still understand a contraction when there is no apostrophe, which makes its presence even more recognizable, and when McCarthy uses an apostrophe, he is acknowledging that something has been lost. It is telling that McCarthy acknowledges this sense of loss only in the text?s positive contractions. He is saying that to be positive is to identify a loss, and by the same token, being negative is to pretend that this world is enough, and to ignore the loss. The text uses almost equal amounts of positive and negative contradictions, which seem to mirror the man?s indecision about whether or not it is necessary to acknowledge his lost life.” (Burt,12)