u/lisususil

In the early portions of Blood Meridian, the Kid travels with the Glanton gang through Mexico, often as a bystander—if not an active participant—in extreme violence. The narrative employs a kind of sleight of hand, avoiding precise specification of the Kid’s actions during the most brutal episodes. Rather than exonerating him, this omission suggests that the story we are told may be intentionally filtered by the narrator.

Given that the novel’s religious imagery is overwhelmingly Christian, it is reasonable to adopt that as the primary theological lens. Under such a framework, the figure of the Judge complicates a straightforward identification with the devil. While the Judge’s brutalities and banalities are described in exhaustive detail, this very literalness seems to argue against him being Satan in a traditional Christian sense. Because Christ’s defeat of death removes its ultimate power, the devil’s aim is not the destruction of mortal bodies but the ruin of immortal souls.

It is this ruin of the soul, above all else, that the Judge embodies. He is introduced as a peculiar individual with some very odd attributes, yet the extent of his grotesqueness can be ignored and wafted away, at least up until the moment of John Joel Glanton’s death. The utter inversion of what the Judge is in the story at this point is, I posit, most effectively read as the Kid suddenly realizing what he has allowed himself to become during his time in the gang. The collapse of any justification of the Kid’s agentic dissonance regarding whatever it was he was engaged in strips away the illusion of delegated responsibility; no longer can he conceive of himself as merely acting under orders, as a passive instrument within a hierarchy, but must instead confront the fact of his own authorship in the violence he has enacted, and the moral vacancy that such recognition reveals.

In any case, whatever exactly it was that he engaged in during the main narrative portion, the Kid—now the man—seems intent, at least at a glance, on trying to change. He attempts small acts that suggest decency, though these almost seem in vain. Take his attempt to help the old woman, only to find she is long dead.

Then there is the killing of the fifteen-year-old. Regardless of morality, this interaction signals that wherever the man goes, a trail of bodies, even those of children, seems to follow. The man cannot escape what he is haunted by and what he is part of.

The element of the Bible he carried with him, despite being illiterate, speaks to the intentions of the man. Despite the external appearance of change, he is unable to access, or perhaps even uninterested in, the word of God. That gap mirrors his broader condition—he senses moral weight, yet rather than repent, he tries to run and hide.

With this sense of understanding, the narrator’s great elaboration on the evildoing of the Judge can be read as projection, should we grant that the man is in fact the narrator of the story. The horrors which the Judge commits are used to fill the gaps left by the omission of the Kid’s exact actions during the Glanton gang arc. The man, unable to reconcile the most abhorrent actions or urges of his youth, maps them onto this grotesque creature. This futile attempt to replace repentance and forgiveness with deflection and artifice only serves to strengthen the monster that pursues and torments him.

By the time of their final meeting at Fort Griffin, the unaging Judge Holden is this very inversion made manifest. The man has forfeited any illusion of hope. He has taken into his own hands, as so many do, judgment—an authority that belongs to God alone. In an attempt to reconcile his past, he turns this judgment inward. The tragedy is that the man has chosen to usurp this authority and yet, without the unbounded love of God, faces a far crueler sentence as he does this.

As for the specific and tangible, demon-adjacent descriptions of the Judge—his supernatural knowledge and physical dominance, as well as matching aesthetic traits such as fiddle playing—they can meaningfully be understood as signs that it is unreasonable to analyze this personage as one might a literal human. His contribution to the Glanton gang brings to mind the Orthodox tradition of Saint Nicetas, to whom a demon, disguised as an angel, was able to entrap him with astounding and unknowable worldly knowledge in exchange for his knowledge of Christ.

The torment of the man thus culminates at the conclusion of Blood Meridian. Having grown exhausted from fleeing his own sin, he finds self-judgment to be more bearable than submission to what he perceives as an unbearable, unmerited mercy. He can no longer “dance,” no longer sustain the belief that he is redeemable. His movement toward the outhouse can therefore be understood as the final enactment of this judgment.

As he enters the outhouse, having embodied ultimate rebellion in seeking to wield the power of God, he sacrifices whatever desire he may have had for betterment to the Judge whose role he fully adopts. In his final moments, the collapse of the boundary between our protagonist of unknowable innocence and this unspeakably abhorrent being—which has been used to quarantine all of his guilt—ceases to be. This collapse—this rebellion, a reenactment of original sin and all that stems from it, an expression of the innate evil that, at least in this world, will live forever—becomes immediately unbearable to the man, though perhaps more fittingly at this point, to the Judge.

Rather than turning to Christ, seeking to embody the role of priest, prophet, and king, the man instead enters the outhouse as his own judge, jury, and executioner.