Cormac McCarthy's decision to use almost no punctuation in his later novels is not an affectation — or rather, it is an affectation in the technical sense of something deliberately adopted, and it's justified by what it achieves. The absence of quotation marks removes the frame that normally separates speech from narration, which means dialogue and description inhabit the same continuous present. The absence of apostrophes in contractions does something similar: it smooths the prose surface.

In Blood Meridian, this creates a quality of relentlessness — the violence occurs in the same register as the landscape, neither foregrounded nor diminished. The prose refuses to signal that anything is more important than anything else, which is its own kind of statement.

In The Road, the stripped punctuation serves the stripped world. The book is about a civilization that has lost its grammar as well as its infrastructure. The style is the subject.