/lit/ - Literature

>>21462591
So after an onslaught of depraved violence and a linguistic assault, with more than a hundred carefully placed mirrors in a construction taut and fragile, on the book’s last page the judge triumphantly declares that he will never die. Blood Meridian opens and closes in the present tense, extending beyond the spatiotemporal world of the nineteenth century borderlands. The book begins, “See the child” (3), a phrase reminiscent of both the title of Nietzsche’s book and Pontius Pilate’s command of “Ecce homo,” or “Behold the man,” placing the reader in the position to judge. Blood Meridian closes with the judge, the embodiment of the Nietzschean worldview, towering over the dance of war as the drunken brutes “stomp and hoot and lurch against one another” (334). In the anteroom the tobacco smoke circles the lamps “like an evil fog,” and within the ring of dancers pirouettes the judge; the smoke, the dancers, and the judge all circling to represent the Eternal Return (334). For all we know the kid lies murdered and mutilated in the outhouse; the victorious judge is dancing, dancing; and it seems the vicious circle does not end.

But wait now, for there’s a rider to the tale.

Although the story concludes with the judge declaring he will never die, McCarthy does not give him the final word. McCarthy presents us with an italicized epilogue, marking a change into a “heightened, poetic register, signified not only by the italicized font, but also by the esoteric symbolism that abounds within the strange scene.”20 The only other word that is italicized in the book is him, when the Reverend Green refers to the son of God (6). I argue that the italicized font of the epilogue mirrors the italicized reference to Jesus, and therefore offers us a hint at its meaning. While many of the preceding novel’s puzzles can be solved by viewing the text through a Nietzschean lens, to decipher the mysterious epilogue one needs to view it through a Gnostic lens. Gnostic allusions abound throughout Blood Meridian, with the kid as the Salvator Salvatus, or a Savior in need of salvation; and nowhere are these allusions more evident than in the epilogue. The dark of the preceding pages of the novel belongs to the judge, the embodiment of Nietzschean nihilism, but in the dawn of the epilogue a new figure emerges:

“In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there.”

>my gimmick...is that I am....LE COWBOY PHILOSOPHER!

>>19682368
Chuds fear him.