Cormac McCarthy's The Road is very well known for it's minimalistic writing style. Many people's complaints on the review section for it have led me to share this bit of info with the rest of the TV Tropes community. The minimalistic style mirrors the condition of the world. There is essentially nothing left; there is no society, an unknown global disaster caused The End of the World as We Know It that still continues to plague the world (the burning trees and snow-like ash), the majority of the population has gone insane, etc. That is all there is written BECAUSE that is all that is written.
It also makes sense of the bursts of very high-level words. The best example of this is salitter. Excluding that one book, this is a word that hasn't really been used in centuries. And yet it's used just as another burst in the book. Why? All the big ideas are going. All the ideas are about equally obscure when—to pluck an example—there's a chance no one could tell you the story of Little Red Riding Hood anymore. The man and the boy may come across something good, but then... —Red Wren
So when the world ended it took all the commas with it?
Essentially, yes; it has been used as part of interpreting the bleakness in the story's setting.
