On Parody in Cormac McCarthy's Novels

Parody is one of Cormac McCarthy's main narrative strategies. McCarthy is a contemporary American novelist with strong historical, national and religious consciousness, so the works he parodies are those with rich historical and cultural implication such as Homeric Epic, Bible, literary classics of the American West and corrido. McCarthy uses various ways when parodying different objects, which includes displaying the human evilness and the tragic complex in modern people's life pursuit, inspiring people to give up evil so as to build a perfect society, exposing the social evils in modern capitalistic big consumption era, using poetic language to show his irony towards the social darkness and the broken American dream, etc. McCarthy makes the readers recognize the history in intertextual contrasts through his parody.