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A review by hunger
Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
Kindly fell on hard times aint ye son? he said.
I just aint fell on no good ones.
Blood Meridian start out with an orphan-like child who takes to violence. He is recruited by the army so that his rage might beget a purpose. The writing is closer to poetry than prose. The story is about man and violence and how these are eternal. But what does the kid’s repeated acts of mercy tell us? Despite being hardened by war and the most terrible acts of debauchery again and again, it does not scare him from compassion. Does this mean that some people are fated to be a certain way? Or is it a conscious choice every individual is presented with? Does the Judge’s ruthlessness make him a bad person, or is only the force that made him bad to blame?
McCarthy asks, ‘If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?’. I would like to think that one’s fate is in our own hands. And war is one we wage against ourselves, against succumbing to our weakest or wrongest desires. And our fight is between what we want and what we need, and whether we can tell them apart.
I just aint fell on no good ones.
Blood Meridian start out with an orphan-like child who takes to violence. He is recruited by the army so that his rage might beget a purpose. The writing is closer to poetry than prose. The story is about man and violence and how these are eternal. But what does the kid’s repeated acts of mercy tell us? Despite being hardened by war and the most terrible acts of debauchery again and again, it does not scare him from compassion. Does this mean that some people are fated to be a certain way? Or is it a conscious choice every individual is presented with? Does the Judge’s ruthlessness make him a bad person, or is only the force that made him bad to blame?
McCarthy asks, ‘If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?’. I would like to think that one’s fate is in our own hands. And war is one we wage against ourselves, against succumbing to our weakest or wrongest desires. And our fight is between what we want and what we need, and whether we can tell them apart.