Blood Meridian

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Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite authors, and I always find something new each time I read one of his books. This was my second time to read BM. His stories are not-for-the-faint-of-heart in that the brutality in the man vs man conflict is an essential part of many of his plots, and this one is certainly exemplary. His characters are iconic archetypes that you won't soon forget. And when you hear people quote, "They move on," you'll know where the quote originated. Reviews that I read said to listen to the audio book read by Richard Poe, so I have that one to pick up from my library today!

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Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Blood Meridian, utilizes a unique point of view, depictive imagery and illusive symbolism to ultimately complete his goal of giving insight into the infamous “Wild West” of the mid-19th century. The idealistic view of the “Wild West” that’s often thought about consists of freedom, riches, and prosperity. In his novel McCarthy reveals the real “Wild West” by following a band of scalp hunters through their tour of the Texas-Mexico border. He gives insight into how harsh and brutal the “Wild West” really was and the true struggle of prospering in the western frontier. The story follows the journey of a young man who is only referred to as the Kid. The reader is never brought into the mind of the Kid but follow him throughout his journey along with the historically known “Glanton Gang” as they become famous scalp hunters along the Texas-Mexico border. The novel’s objective third person point of view adds to the overall ruthlessness of the story’s tone by not allowing the readers inside the character’s thoughts and motives. Character development is stunted by the constant killing and violence throughout each chapter, creating continuous action and unrest . McCarthy strategically does not develop the characters to show how cruel and raw the life of these bandits are. The lack of development forces the reader’s to create the motive and reason through every violent and barbaric act the gang commits. Not only is McCarthy using this to accomplish his ultimate goal of the “Wild West” but also enables the novel to have very diverse interpretations. McCarthy deals with the lack of character development by utilizing depictive imagery used to describe the bareness of the desert, the harsh climate, and the extremity of the Glanton Gang’s actions. After a slaughter of indians by the Glanton Gang, describes it by stating that “The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and this placed died.” (174) McCarthy uses imagery to show the emotion of the scene without going into the minds of the characters. The image that is created is extremely vivid and incredibly brutal. He does this in order for the reader to see how cruel the scalp hunter are, but also to show how brutal and unwelcoming the surrounding is. McCarthy describes the desert saying “There was no wind and the silence out there was greatly favored by every kind of fugitive as was the open country itself and no mountains close at hand for enemies to black themselves against.”(236) The bareness of the desert creates a tone of loneliness for the audience. At no point in the novel can the audience see inside the characters head but the audience can feel that the gang is lonely too by the emptiness created by the desert. McCarthy’s used symbolism to allude back to his ultimate thematic idea of the “Wild West.” This enabled the reader to tie the diverse plot together. There are several instances where symbolism is alluded back to McCarthy’s ultimate goal, but none was more evident than in the character known as the Judge. In the name itself it is led to believe that he is above everyone else. The Judge is the most intelligent member of the Glanton Gang and seems to always have a way around every situation and explanation for every terrible event. The cunny and almost mystical characteristics of the judge alludes to the symbolism that he represents, the devil. The judge symbolizes the picture perfect image of a “Wild West” bandit. He is cunning, ruthless, and generally overall badass. His philosophical take on life is that god is war and that the human race was designed to constantly be at war. The judge claims that to “Seen so, war is the truest form of divination... War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.” (261) The judge represents everything in the novel that is cold, heartless, and ruthless. There are several allusions between the judge and the devil but it is never more clear than in the final scene when it is said that “Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing... He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge.” (348) The judge being the only one who survives the novel is alluded to the devil by the evil and ruthlessness that lives inside him and in the “Wild West”. Anyone with a conscious in the novel is dead. In conclusion, Blood Meridian is the ultimate book on the “Wild West.” McCarthy completes the image of the “Wild West” by his strategic use of point of view, imagery, and symbolism throughout the novel without missing a step. Every page is thought out and carefully planned to depict the perfect image of what it is like to be a scalphunter in the 1850s. After reading the novel, one would be easily convinced that the “Wild West” was a very dangerous and cruel place to journey through and not to be taken lightly.

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Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is a novel set in the west during the mid-1800’s. The novel is based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border, following the Kid from a very young age as he soon finds himself in a harsh and unforgiving world. Blood Meridian focuses on the harsh life of the Kid, as he battles nature’s elements, betrayal, and lives the life of a scalp hunter. This works to explore the theme of the difference between living violently (the Kid), and living insanely as portrayed by Judge Holden and others. Through the blood and gore, Blood Meridian was a book that I thoroughly enjoyed. The never ending action and conflict throughout the novel makes for a messy but enticing read. In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, McCarthy uses imagery and third person limited to tell a blunt tale of the unforgiving wild west during the mid-1800s. He utilizes these tools to further comment on the difference between living violently as a necessary evil and living insanely. Blood Meridian follows the Kid through a time of great conflict in the wild west. In the novel, the Kid joins a section of the army on a mission to settle a land dispute between the U.S. and Mexico, and later joins a band of scalp hunters. In the band of scalp hunters, there are two men that I see as insane; Judge Holden and Glanton. In the novel, there are scenes of the scalp hunters killing babies, drowning dogs, making a sport of killing, to feed their thirst for violence. While the Kid is in the scalp hunting gang with these savages, he doesn’t have the thirst for killing that Holden and Glanton have. The Kid doesn’t have near the thirst for killing like his fellow scalp hunters, Holden and Glanton. The Kid is morally strong in comparison to his leaders. McCarthy uses the difference of the Kid and his leaders to create an interesting dynamic between them, specifically the Kid and Judge Holden. This is the relationship that the author utilizes to explore the theme in the novel. McCarthy works to explore the theme of differentiating between living violently as a necessary evil and living insanely through emphasizing Glanton’s and Holden’s savage personalities and exposing the Kid’s ‘morality’. Throughout the novel, it is made clear that the Judge and Glanton kill for the sport of killing. At one point in the book, the Judge gathers a young Apache boy and has him ride on his saddle. As if to feed his thirst for killing, the Judge kills the boy and then scalps him. “Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed with his saddle but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it”(170), and after questioning the judge “smiled and wiped the scalp on the leg of his trousers” (171) as if to have acquired a fix for his addiction. This is one example out of many savagery acts Judge Holden displays himself with. “But the judge had set forth, dogs dangling. He crossed upon the stone bridge and he looked down into the swollen waters and raised the dogs and pitched them in” (201), the Judge then watches as another man shoots the dogs in the water. McCarthy uses imagery in this example to make the dogs seem helpless and the Judge seem brutal. In comparison to the Judge, the Kid is a moral figure in the novel. When the Judge is looking to kill Tobin and the Kid, the Kid passes up the chance to kill the Judge even though the Judge has betrayed him. “The expriest raised himself slightly and looked at the kid. The kid lowered the hammer of the pistol” (311). This shows that the Kid doesn’t want to kill the Judge even though the Judge has intentions of killing Tobin and the Kid. The Judge wouldn’t have hesitated on the trigger, while the kid does not want to betray the Judge and unnecessarily kill someone. Unfortunately for the Kid, the Judge ends up killing him, thus proving the Judge’s insanity and sheer violence. Although the reader doesn’t exactly know what the Kid is thinking because of the third person point of view, one can assume that the Kid uses his morality more than the Judge. Overall, Blood Meridian was an exciting and enticing novel to read. The book successfully achieved its goal of illustrating the life of a ruff and rugged cowboy/scalp hunter of the wild west. The novel focuses on both the unforgiving people and the unforgiving setting of the story. An idea suggested by the book was that the treacherous terrain, unpredictable weather, and the lifestyle of a scalp hunter, has made the Kid an animal. While the Kid is lost, he sees a burning tree with animals gathered around the fire. I think this comments on the fact that at this moment, the Kid is no longer a human, but an animal surviving the harsh elements. McCarthy effectively uses imagery to expose the harsh reality of the killings and emphasize the savage-like instincts that the scalp hunters had. Written in the third person, the novel is fairly blunt and it is sometimes tough to get a read on the thoughts and feelings of subdued characters such as the Kid. This is why I think it would have been interesting to see the story through the Kid’s perspective, to truly understand his thoughts and the rationale behind the things he does. In conclusion, Cormac McCarthy uses the imagery and the third person to tell a blunt tale of the unforgiving wild west during the mid-1800s. He utilizes these tools to further comment on the difference between living violently as a necessary evil and living insanely. Through events in the novel, I think it is clear that the Judge is violently insane, while the Kid at least possesses a fiber of morality. McCarthy uses imagery beautifully to describe the setting and the rough lives of these scalp hunters, while using the third person to emphasize the shallowness and the characters cold-bloodedness.

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Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy Critique Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Blood Meridian is known as one of the bloodiest books in American literature, and with good reason. As you could expect, this novel is all about blood. Violence is the key theme in this story, and it can be found everywhere. Readers are thrown into the south immediately, following a fourteen year old boy from Tennessee and shadowing his adventures. What starts off as a Mexican hunt in the name of America quickly turns into an Indian scalping party. The boy meets characters like Glanton and other indian hunters as they embark on their journey. As the prices for scalps rise in Mexico, the prices on the party members’ heads do too. This struggle creates endless violence as the young boy tries to cope in the “wild west”. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is set in the south, similar to All the Pretty Horses and several of his other novels. This depiction of the “wild west” is common in his books, and portrays what life was really like past the stereotypical cowboy. This novel takes place in the year 1847, which is right in the middle of the Mexican-American War. Because of this time period, the American’s don’t receive the warmest welcome in Mexican villages. McCarthy depicts this real, historical struggle by placing countless bar fights and skirmishes between the Mexicans and Americans in his novel. Another important element of this setting is the barren-like deserts that make up Mexico. Throughout the novel, the scalping party finds itself venturing for days on end through hot, dry landscapes. This not only captures the geography of the real Wild West, but also represents the emptiness and struggle these men faced in a conflicted Mexico. During 1847, it was common for Indians to be discriminated against as their land was invaded by settlers. Because of this, the Apaches and other Indian groups make an appearance in this novel and are very hostile to both Mexicans and Americans. There are a couple main points of focus that are made prevalent in Blood Meridian. One big theme of this novel is the battle against evil, and morality in general. In such a dangerous, free-for-all setting like the Wild West, all morals seem to be crooked. There is a character known as the Judge that symbolizes the devil and evil itself. This character is constantly running into the kid, and has poor morals. In a land where killing is solved by more killing, morals seem to be nonexistent. Every character in this novel is arguably immoral, yet both sides think they are just in killing the other group. Another big idea in this novel is coming of age. As the kid goes farther south, he is metaphorically descending to hell. As the kid comes up however, he has the knowledge of someone older than himself, and has learned valuable lessons about life which changes his character. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, violence is found everywhere in this novel. From bar fights to scalping parties, this book has violence on every page. McCarthy creates this violence to illustrate what life was really like back in the Wild West, proving that it didn’t get its name for nothing. McCarthy is able to create this violence using various literary techniques. McCarthy effectively uses literary elements such as imagery and point of view to create the theme of violence throughout Blood Meridian. By creating vivid scenes of skirmishes and slaughters, McCarthy is able to portray violence. Imagery such as “One of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew…” creates graphic pictures in the readers mind and enhances the violence. This novel is also in a third person point of view, so the reader sees more violence then just one character would see. This point of view also requires the reader to fill in the thoughts of characters. Overall, this book is a great read for anyone seeking a thrilling, violence driven story. McCarthy’s genius writing style portrays what the real Wild West was really like, along with the time period of 1847. This book is a great read because it contains several symbols and references that add to the meaning of the story. For Wild West fanatics, this novel is an absolute gold mine. If you get queasy at the thought of blood, you may want to pick another book, but if you love your daily dose of violence, then this book is the right pick for you.

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In Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant novel Blood Meridian, he paints a gruesome picture of the savage West, exposing man’s affinity for violence and the resultant moral degradation. Though difficult to digest, the story opened my eyes to the invaluableness of life due to its shocking and terrifyingly blatant absence in the narrative. The story opens up in the mid-1800s, when the American belief of Manifest Destiny was good and strong. They believed expansion--and whatever death and destruction that went with it--was both justified and inevitable. McCarthy’s story details the Indian scalping business, a lurid currency that developed amidst that expansion. For McCarthy, it had to take guts to write this out. The amount of violence could very well make this the bloodiest book in American literature. He refused to romanticize the West. By taking it on, McCarthy had to be unafraid of the truth and morally conscious enough to honestly and objectively portray this world centered around greed and violence. Blood Meridian ostensibly follows a lost and ragged boy--known as the kid--as he gets caught up in the violent and enigmatic world of the Indian scalping business along the American/Mexican border, learning more about the nature of man and war than he initially expected. The story has everything you would want out of an R-rated Western: blood, guts, sex, plunder. But instead of having occasional scenes of such horror, at every page turn, at every paragraph break, blood spills forth: beheadings, scalpings, burnings, hackings, quarterings, impalings. Use your imagination, and even your most farfetched killing method seems to be included with regularity in here. However, the story isn’t solely a narrative of sin. While the kid is the point of centrality in the novel, not much is told about him. Readers learn about his world from the characters with which he interacts, almost like a radar collecting data from its sphere of detection. McCarthy, mainly through the kid’s experiences with the Judge, the deeply metaphysical and perverted antagonist, manages to comment on and debate complex moral issues and mysteries, such as the instinctiveness of war, the impossibility of innocence, and even the very purpose of holding morals in the first place. Though a bit ambiguous, the Judge seems to me to be an icon of the evil in man. Occasionally it was quite uncomfortable to read some of the things he said: the beliefs he was outlining, the way he spoke to others, the nefarious deeds he committed. Perhaps he is a symbol for the Devil himself, with his deeply manipulative and knowledgeable encouragement of evil. For the longest time he appeared to be on the “good side” (if there could even be such a thing in this novel), but eventually corruption seeped through his façade of rationality like a dark, oozing bloodstain. He was the center of the moral investigation throughout the novel, but any justification he gave couldn’t be trusted for he was the very epitome of falsity. By the end of the novel, it’s hard to know what was real or not. It’s incredibly brilliant. It’s immensely unnerving. It's damn near uncanny. Everything about this novel was expertly executed: the dialects, phrasing, diction choices, structural choices, etc. The characters are quite believable and unforgiving, so much so I feel I could find their names in an American history textbook. McCarthy’s intense and fascinatingly unique imagery highlights the sheer terror of this Western world: the hopelessness of indifference and suffering in the pestilential desert and the transcendence of the isolation therein. He leaves no room for fanciful ideas. There were only a few things I wish were done differently. One, the lack of input from any of the other characters. Perhaps it was an intentional choice--to bombard readers with the heretic ideals of the Judge and to show the lack of depth within these murderous men--but I would have liked to get a feel for the others’ beliefs and opinions of their situation. The contrast, or perhaps the mutuality with the Judge, would have added much to the moral conflict. Second, the plot seemed a bit too repetitive: plunder, party, plunder, party, repeat. It wasn’t until the end the plot gained some interesting developments again. However, perhaps this, too, was a deliberate choice. It could very well be used to show the unconscious, methodic, almost rhythmic act of which became murder. Thirdly, and finally, I was completely taken off-guard by the ending. To anyone who reads this book, take note: the last two pages are immensely important and highly cryptic. Pay attention to the connotation of certain phrases. This is all I will say on the subject, but again take note. I seemed to have missed a very important moment when I first read it. While this novel could leave the faint-hearted with nightmares, I wholly appreciate the honesty with which McCarthy displayed the caustic cruelty, perversion, and inhumanity of this world. The highlighting of evil, in a way, increased tenfold the necessity of good. In the end, this story became not solely one of wickedness but of the rising need of virtue. Morals beside, it was the most exciting and intriguing book I have ever read. I got completely caught up in the adventure, even at the most violent parts. Women, do not fear this novel. The Judge may call war a man’s game, but you are brave enough for this, too. All in all, Blood Meridian was undeniably awesome.

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An American epic to be sure. Blood Meridian is a literary feat that, like Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time in America, locates the antediluvian West somewhere in the Old Testament - a pestilential landscape of mud-brick Gomorrahs and inhospitable but numinous wastes - where freedom and violence are two sides of an ill-gotten coin.

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If the mark of a great book or author is being enveloped by a different reality, then Blood Meridian is one of the best books I have ever read and Cormac McCarthy is one of the greats. Based in a time that was and a place that is this books pulls you into it's story as few others have. Ostensibly a story about The Kid it is a moving panorama, dark and apochryphal. One rides with these men as silent witness, struggling to survive as they do. Dark, dirty and dismal, one is loath to acknowledge the truth at the core of the story. The truth paints this reality with a patina that roots it in our world while we hope that it is not so.

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Although Blood Meridian is difficult to read at times due to the subject matter, McCarthy's description of the unforgiving American West and the equally unforgiving characters is absorbing. The ruthless Glanton gang pursues their bloody mission, the group as unforgiving to their prey as the West itself.

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Quite possibly my favorite book. While relentlessly violent, you'll never want to put this down. Beyond epic.

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Horrifyingly violent and utterly devoid of sentimentality. I was afraid to read this book for years, and I admit I was glad when it was over and I could turn to something more uplifting. While I was reading it however I was completely mesmerized. Readers looking for comforting moral messages, empathetic characters, or happy endings should look elsewhere. Reminded me of the later work of Burroughs, but without the drug use, gay sex, and time travel.