![]() Furthermore, McCarthy’s portrayal is made all the more striking by the matter-of-fact manner of the description, manifested in the simple ‘They found the lost scouts’ and offers no sense of emotion or shock, paradoxically making the description, through its plainness, all the more shocking and disturbing. They were skewered through the cords of their heels … where they’d been roasted until their … brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes.’ The conjured image is made so striking and disturbing to the reader through McCarthy’s vivid and unadulterated description of the bodies to such horrific detail rarely found in the pages of a novel. This violence is made so striking through the sheer brutality of it, manifested in ‘They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree. The tale recounts the mindless violence of the group as they kill any who stand in their way. ![]() He is consequently captured and recruited to a band of American ex-soldiers whom the local authorities charge with the order of killing and scalping Indians who roam the American desert, thus commencing the savage and barbaric journey which witnesses atrocities unseen before. The reader is immersed within this world of terror and violence in the first pages of the book, as the kid finds himself thrown into several conflicts and affrays as he sets off from his homeland – his first being in a religious assembly as the Judge enters and accuses the preacher of being a criminal, thus erupting the place into gun shots, ‘already gunfire was general within the tent … women screaming … folk trampled underfoot in the mud,’ and again as the kid flees from the meeting to a saloon, with violence there ensuing between him and a drunken man, ‘the man lunged after him with the jagged bottleneck and tried to stick it in his eye … the hands were slick with blood,’ thus setting a mood of violence which governs the kid’s journey onwards.Īs the kid journeys through the barren and savage country of Southern United States, he is enlisted to join the army of Captain White. The violence portrayed in Blood Meridian is of such barbarism and atrocity that it leaves the reader aghast by the deeds perpetrated. Less fearsome scenes do sometimes emerge, but are meant to be understood in contrast with the barbarity of McCarthy’s episodes and characterizations. ![]() McCarthy makes even more vivid and degenerate the actions of the group through Judge Holden by expressing the violent thoughts and justifications for their violence from the eyes of an horrific and twisted killer. ![]() Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is seen by critics as a uniquely violent and powerful work of modern literature, and McCarthy achieves such an arresting mood through the sheer depravity of the deeds described, in conjunction with the contrast conveyed by momentary acts of humility. ![]()
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