For those not familiar, Blood Meridian is a book by Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men and The Road, although it is somewhat less narratively driven (and much more dense of a read) than many of his later works.
The book is presented as a western, telling the story of an unnamed runaway youth and the brutal gang of American scalp-hunting mercenaries that he falls in with, but that story is really only a lens through which McCarthy explores the nature of man and war, the eternal and impersonal disposition of the universe, the cyclical ebb and flow of civilizations, and probably quite a few other themes that simply didn't speak as loudly to me as these ones did.
The first hint that this isn't simply a good ol' western adventure is in the bafflingly genius title. Blood Meridian. Blood - well, we all know what this is. Meridian - a circle of set longitude. So we can take the title as a reference to any one of at least three things: the actual geographical meridian below which blood flows liberally (Texas / Mexico in this case); the red band of sunset that characterizes cliched western iconography; or the image of a scalping, a band of blood forming around the dome of the skull.
While the protagonist of the book is ostensibly "the kid," the most domineering and central force of the story is certainly Judge Holden, the terrifying, originless, and infinitely educated giant of a man. I challenge you to find a character more unsettling than this:
And as described by his own compatriots:
It's more than a simple physical terror that he evokes though... it's a philosophical one, for the Judge is the ultimate human - violent, reasoned, erudite, ever-thinking, uncaring for an environment he wishes nothing more than total ownership and knowledge of.
This detached depiction of humanity remains a theme throughout. We never learn of any character's thoughts or feelings. Men are nothing more than another part of the environment, their actions as deterministic as that of the earth's rotation. One of the many instances where this is reflected:
Even a simple fire is rendered a point of grand reflection:
(Also is this not literally the thesis of the entire Dark Souls trilogy?!)
There are just so many more moments I could continue about, so many themes which spoke to me, and yet so many more that others have discussed which I myself didn't even notice.... this book is just so ripe. But I'll spare everyone the excess blathering.
It's been a long time since I've read something that resonated with me this much. It really is a masterwork.
Feel free to discuss anything that spoke to you in the text if you've read it, and if you haven't, well.... what are you waiting for?
(As an aside, this is a fantastic listen in audiobook format. I primarily went through it this way and then re-read parts of the text that spoke to me. Be warned, as a text alone it has a... unique style that can be somewhat challenging.)
The book is presented as a western, telling the story of an unnamed runaway youth and the brutal gang of American scalp-hunting mercenaries that he falls in with, but that story is really only a lens through which McCarthy explores the nature of man and war, the eternal and impersonal disposition of the universe, the cyclical ebb and flow of civilizations, and probably quite a few other themes that simply didn't speak as loudly to me as these ones did.
The first hint that this isn't simply a good ol' western adventure is in the bafflingly genius title. Blood Meridian. Blood - well, we all know what this is. Meridian - a circle of set longitude. So we can take the title as a reference to any one of at least three things: the actual geographical meridian below which blood flows liberally (Texas / Mexico in this case); the red band of sunset that characterizes cliched western iconography; or the image of a scalping, a band of blood forming around the dome of the skull.
While the protagonist of the book is ostensibly "the kid," the most domineering and central force of the story is certainly Judge Holden, the terrifying, originless, and infinitely educated giant of a man. I challenge you to find a character more unsettling than this:
And as described by his own compatriots:
It's more than a simple physical terror that he evokes though... it's a philosophical one, for the Judge is the ultimate human - violent, reasoned, erudite, ever-thinking, uncaring for an environment he wishes nothing more than total ownership and knowledge of.
This detached depiction of humanity remains a theme throughout. We never learn of any character's thoughts or feelings. Men are nothing more than another part of the environment, their actions as deterministic as that of the earth's rotation. One of the many instances where this is reflected:
Even a simple fire is rendered a point of grand reflection:
(Also is this not literally the thesis of the entire Dark Souls trilogy?!)
There are just so many more moments I could continue about, so many themes which spoke to me, and yet so many more that others have discussed which I myself didn't even notice.... this book is just so ripe. But I'll spare everyone the excess blathering.
It's been a long time since I've read something that resonated with me this much. It really is a masterwork.
Feel free to discuss anything that spoke to you in the text if you've read it, and if you haven't, well.... what are you waiting for?
(As an aside, this is a fantastic listen in audiobook format. I primarily went through it this way and then re-read parts of the text that spoke to me. Be warned, as a text alone it has a... unique style that can be somewhat challenging.)
