Handling of time and structure

The basic handling of time that McCarthy displays is not in chronological order and he uses his speech and descriptions of the surroundings to expand and contract time. He telescopes moments to shorten them, therefore the audience has little awareness of time passing throughout the novel. McCarthy does however occasionally mention the passing of morning and evening and makes reference to the protagonists eating when they wake up and before they go to sleep, which indicates the days passing. The characters have no routine, but they are desperately grasping to the humanity left in the world by having a meal which they class as breakfast and a meal at night which is their dinner, this is because there is no real structure to their days as they travel down the road, so to save their sanity they keep this eating routine.

• Passing of the days

"They'd slept the night through and the day that followed" (pg. 152)
"three nights later" (pg. 27)
"When he woke in the woods in the dark and in the cold of the night." (pg.1)

• Markers of the year

"He thought the month was October but he wasn't sure" (pg. 2)
"On cold Winter nights" (pg. 26)

• Narrative time is expanded (elongated time)

The whole scene with the road rat (pg. 62-72)
'He raised his head slowly'
The cellar scene (pg. 116-119)

• Telescoped time

"It's snowing" (Pg. 15)
"It's almost warm" (pg.62)

• References to before-Flashback

"In his dream his pale bride came to him.." (pg. 17)
"There was a lake a mile from his Uncle's farm where he and his uncle used to go in the fall" (pg. 11)

• Time seems suspended

"Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench" (pg.116)
"he caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom" (pg. 15)

• Abstract reference to time

"Tolling in the silence and minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease" (Pg. 1)

McCarthy does give particular evidence to time passing because of the description of the loss in weight of the characters. The protagonists get hungrier and they get thinner throughput the novel, to indicate time has past.
There is also a continual description of the cold weather which gives the impression that the world is in a constant winter, which is interested because there could be two possible reasons for this;

1. Time is passing at a considerably slow rate so winter never seems to leave
2. Because they are in a post- apocalyptic world, the weather is in a constant state of cold because everything is dying and decaying around them.

Also throughout the novel there is a continuous present- A paradox. It feels like they are in todays world, with all the billboards and coke cans. The boy was born at the beginning of the apocalypse and has therefore only lived his life in this decaying world.   
There is an increased amount of entropy, increased disorder and chaos even though the world seems to be desolate.