ABSTRACT
If there was one point on which a significant number of early reviewers of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) were united—that is, other than their near-uniform levels of enthusiasm—it was in their identification of the novel’s particularly “Beckettian” quality. In the UK, for instance, the Times described it as “written in a stripped-down, but intermittently lyrical, style that recalls Beckett at his most elliptical”; likewise, Alan Warner, writing in The Guardian, suggested that McCarthy at times sails “close to the prose of late Beckett” (7). Such comparisons were relatively widespread; indeed, the collection of review excerpts found on the Random House website alone contains no fewer than four other explicit references to the 1969 Nobel Laureate. 1 However, this Beckett-like quality is by no means a new development in McCarthy’s work; rather, I argue that Beckett stands alongside Joyce, Faulkner, Twain, and the many others who make up the complex intertextual web of his fourth novel, Suttree (1979). But while The Road’s reviewers consistently drew parallels with the minimalist Beckett of works such as The Unnameable and How It Is, and with the absurdist Beckett of the familiar dramatic works such as Waiting for Godot and, specifically, Endgame, Suttree’s affinities lie with a less familiar Beckett: that of his first published novel, Murphy (1938).
