A Limited Palette: 

McCarthy utilises a limited palette of vocabulary throughout the majority of the novel, this acts as a counterpoint to the rich lyricism also prevalent in The Road and creates several effects. The occasional complex vocabulary can help characterise the man, little is known of his past so the rich vocabulary along with certain other clues (the bath and his knowledge of the brain) indicate that the man is an intelligent character. Arguably by keeping vocabulary simple, avoiding emotional language and reducing rhetoric to a minimum McCarthy makes the narrative itself all the more emotionally engaging. Too much emotional language can result in the reader losing immersion in the text, instead a limited vocabulary makes the novel seem more realistic and allows for a deeper reading experience. The lack of hyperbolic language could also be a result of the man's attempted conditioning of his boy.

Examples of rich lyricism: 

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery" - p 307 - key quote regardless

"Old dreams encroached upon the waking world." - p 299

"Perhaps in the world's destruction it will be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counter spectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence." p 293 - key quote regardless

"He thought the iron armatures had softened in the heat" p 291

"Then they set out upon the road again, slumped and cowled and shivering in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep."  p 133

"A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some slow hydraulic axis." p 130

"The tank beneath was filled with charcoal, pieces burned out of whole sticks and limbs in carbon effigies of the trees themselves." p 129

"He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of pursuable entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have though. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever." p 93 key quote regardless

The above quote describes the opposite of genesis. In genesis God made the world through words, in The Road the names of things are disappearing until everything follows into oblivion- this is another reason why in many parts McCarthy uses a limited palette, he wants to show that the earth is dying and so is everything else with it.

"The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom." pg 15 key quote regardless.