There’s clear similarities between the two even down to verbiage (“moon” and “mock moon riding in the wings” from Stella maris is very clearly a reference to blood meridian, if “mock moon” didnt clinch it then “riding in the wings” absolutely did)
Has anyone else found any similarities ? whether in character analysis, narrative, plot, literary devices…?
As a girl from a small town in the Appalachian south, Alicia Western was able to put into words things I have always felt but never understood. If I could change anything, it’d be Northern Wisconsin rather than Romania. I can’t help but wonder if Alicia would’ve enjoyed Blood Meridian as much as I did. What a “horrible” delight.
Look, I am German, English isn't my first language, I get that the language barrier is part of the problem. But Ive read other books like 1984, Brave New World, 2001, Stasiland, Lord Of The Flies and even The Road and I never had any problems before beyond having to reread a line here and there or having to look up a word every five or six pages.
But Blood Meridian? Its SO confusingly written and uses SO many hyper specific words. A bird isn't just a bird, its a specific race. Bullets are the specific casing names. A storage room in a church isn't a storage room, its a sacristy. Sometimes I google terms and then I dont know the German word either. Or the word doesnt show up on Google. Or Google can't explain the term clearly and needs paragraphs describing it because its some Italian 18th century word that describes a hyper specific emotion or practice.
On top of that the book doesn't use certain punctuation marks which makes reading conversations a little confusing sometimes.
Am I the only one who has this problem with the book?
“Who can dream of God? This man did. In his dreams God was much occupied. Spoken to He did not answer. Called to did not hear. The man could see Him bent at his work. As if through a glass. Seated solely in the light of his own presence. Weaving the world. In his hands it flowed out of nothing and in his hands it vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly. Endlessly. So. Here was a God to study. A God who seemed a slave to his own selfordinated duties. A God with a fathomless capacity to bend all to an inscrutable purpose. Not chaos itself lay outside of that matrix. And somewhere in that tapestry that was the world in its making and in its unmaking was a thread that was he and he woke weeping.”
So I'm gonna say up top, the man makes jokes. There are yuck yucks thrown in.
All his historical analysis I've seen is incredibly well researched, incredibly well written, and in general incredibly funny.
The rest of his work doesn't touch McCarthy, but his historical work is amazing, and if you like this you'll like that too.
What do you think happened to the boy and the family? Honestly, I haven’t read the books, so I only know as much as people here talk about. But I think there’s a darker theme in the book. No matter what, though, I guess there’s still definitely some hope.
Is this weird summary of each chapter there in other versions of the book or just picador collections? I bought no country for old men also published by picador and it doesn't have these summaries so im confused on what exactly is the purpose of them
Love the book and found this an interesting read that I didn’t find had been previously posted in the sub
My great-great-great grandfather was one of Irish immigrants / parishioners that did the stonework on Immaculate Conception in Knoxville. I was raised in Catholic school all 12 years (no scandals, wonderful community and lifelong friends) but am probably closer to being an atheist many years later.
“The point here is not to make an ad hominem smear of Cormac McCarthy, but to note that, when writers render personal experience into fiction, they are seldom trustworthy.[7]” this is a reference to Augusta Britt … but I’m confused what he means by authors being less trustworthy by writing what they’ve lived. This quality is what made Hunter Thompson so uniquely qualified to write (fiction or non).
This thread suggest that the horts Alicia sees in the books may be mathematical entities.
This got me thinking about Lewis Carroll who kinda did the same thing, using characters to discuss mathematical concepts. See here for example.
This reminded me of the references in chapter 1 of The Passenger to a 'spectral operator' and to 'base 2', (where the kid says he is from) both mathematical concepts.
Somewhat more of a stretch, a 'plane' can refer to a mathematical 2d plane or to the crashed airplane in the book.
Perhaps the crashed airplane comes from the same place as the horts, the perfect world or 'wonderland' of mathematical entities. The book would then be the collision of the real world and the 'wonderland' of mathematical entities.
I've already commented on the older thread but it is three years old, so I thought I'd make a new one.
I've had to stop after chapter 2. The writing is engaging enough to keep me semi interested but I feel like I've started to skim read because NOTHING IS HAPPENING.
John Grady is wanting to get married. Billy is a side character.
What is the plot aside from talking about horses and wanting to marry a girl. Where's the drama?
I might come back to it but I'm not getting anything from this book, so I'll move on for now.
I'm picking up hints and suggestions that I didn't get on previous reads - or rather, that I didn't piece together.
It looks to me like the group that eventually saves the boy were shadowing him and the man for a LONG time. Almost from the start.
There is the early settlement where they hear the dog and the boy sees another boy.
Shortly after: "Someone had passed in the night. Running the road in the dark. He stood thinking about that." That group would definitely have seen their fire but they walked on by it.
Then shortly after that two men appear, he thinks they might see him but they just walk on by down the road.
There other hints dotted all throughout. And it leaves me with two questions. Actually three.
Why? I guess they are benevolent and would have simply left the man alone, but a child is too rare in this world to just ignore.
Why not just talk to them and ask them to join up? I think the man would have at best refused to trust them and at worst shot them when they got too close. Maybe that was their thinking too.
The final question is the biggest one.
I actually have no answers for 3, so am curious to know what others think. It's possible I've misinterpreted the book completely and all the above is wrong.
I have considered the possibility that the saviour group is just the dying man's dream, hence the returning trout imagery, and in fact the boy is simply left alone. It would feel like a more McCarthyian ending.
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.
A few questions regarding the last things he’s written..
It seems The Road was the last active book he actually wrote.
The Passenger was basically in editing hell for the last 10 years of his life.
But josh brolin said in a interview that he was visiting him before he died and that he was basically still typing at the edge of his bed…
Thing is didn’t Cormac already donate his typewriter by that time?
And if he was writing till the day he died… will we ever know what those writings were?
hi everyone, i just wanted to let you know the publisher just put the Blood Meridian ebook on sale for $2.99. I think it’s a 24 hour sale. I’ll put some links below if you’re interested.
Finished Blood Meridian about 2 years ago and the Hermit has always stuck out to me from all the disturbing and ambiguous characters in the book. He only takes up a few pages and shows up early on in Chapter 2 where a conversation is held, a heart is shown, and he's later caught bent over the Boy basically in his bed only to crawl away never to be seen or brought up again. Clearly insane and mentally unwell, the inclusion of how close the Hermit was just makes my mind go wild with questions.
What was he doing? What would have happened if the Boy never woke up? How was the Boy just able to fall back asleep after that?? What are your guy's interpretations of the Hermit and why he was included?
I believe a lot of the prose in the beginning of the book seemed to just be setting up the eerie, dark, and nightmarish world of the book. The Hermit also reflects the predatory behavior of almost every adult to the Boy and especially the Judge's treatment towards children. I really don't have much more thoughts on it besides that and what was written in the book. As someone who watches way too many "scary story" YouTube videos about homeless home intruders and meeting hermits out in the woods while camping, this part was pure nightmare fuel. I can see the scene so vividly in my mind and still get goosebumps thinking back on it.
A question for readers who have asked themselves the same thing, not for those who object to comparing these two works. Which of these two would you choose as Cormac McCarthy's magnum opus and why?
Im around 35% through blood meridian on chapter 7 do they ever imply that judge Holden is a demon/Entity beyond a human because in the end he does state he doesn’t die but that could be him just boasting about his power?
I doubt anything can come close, but what do you have?
I obviously loved the dialogue (but that’s McCarthy) and ending.