/lit/ - Literature

After more than thirty years, Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West remains “one of the most elusive and allusive novels in Cormac McCarthy’s canon.” An exploration of the novel’s many allusions led me to a new comprehensive interpretation of the book incorporating the historical revelations of John Sepich, the Nietzschean interpretation of Shane Shimpf, and the Gnostic interpretations of Leo Daugherty and Petra Mundik. In addition to referencing numerous literary works and thinkers, Blood Meridian repeatedly alludes to itself. More than one hundred carefully placed mirrors—words, phrases, themes, and structures—occur throughout the book. These mirrors form a ‘vicious circle’ as an expression of Friedrich Nietzsche’s August 1881 realization of the Eternal Return, that “everything becomes and recurs eternally.” Though the bulk of the novel is a “meditation on a Nietzschean world where God has died,” the epilogue, viewed through a Gnostic lens, provides a glimmer of hope opposing this nihilism.

In his essay, “Of Judge Holden’s Hats; or The Palindrome in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Christopher Forbis cites more than sixty mirrors throughout the book to convincingly argue that Blood Meridian is a palindrome. “By way of method,” Forbis explains, “I ball-point pen numbered a copy of Blood Meridian’s last page, the Epilogue at 337, with a zero, until on the novel’s earliest page, of epigraphs, I wrote 337. All page-pairs that sum to 337 are exact mirrors.” Forbis then searched through the book marking dozens of mirrors he found, allowing for a two-page margin of error. Some mirrors Forbis cites are as follows:

The Leonid meteors (3) are described as the story opens, and on the mirror page at the book’s close, stars are “falling across the sky myriad and random” (333).

Several words appear on mirror pages: “childlike” (6, 332), “opinion” (6, 330), “destination” (112, 225).

One of the most striking mirrors concerns hats. After he has disrupted the Reverend Green’s sermon, the judge stands at the bar with two hats and a double handful of coins in front of him, one of the hats likely the Reverend Green’s former collection plate (8). On the mirror page at the book’s end, the showman in a tyrolean costume moves among the crowd shaking coins in his hat, while the judge wears a “round hat with a narrow brim” (325). At the book’s meridian, at a peak moment for the gang, the judge appears last of all at the governor’s ball, clad in a freshly tailored suit complete with a Panama hat joined from “two such lesser hats” with such skill that “the joinery did scarcely show at all” (169). Forbis argues that the spliced hat is a metaphor for the novel. Indeed, the hat crowns the book’s most striking figure, the judge.

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More books like this? Either similar in style, themes or setting. I avoided it due to meme status but I actually really enjoyed it.
This is the first Cormac I've read so recommendations on which of his books is most like this one are also welcome.

Blood Meridian if you can stand redneck forms of speech and the like. They still haven't been able to finish filming a movie from it because like every other scene is a fight or a rape. kek

In Cold Blood can be pretty devastating too. American Psycho, Godfather and the like ofc also but you've probs seen the movies already so not much new there.

Only incels and weird white guys with /pol/ tendencies like this garbage

I don't get it, I'm halfway through the book and it's just a group of Americans riding around Mexico killing Indians and Mexicans. Please tell me the rest of the book isn't like this because I don't see why it's so revered

Was it rape?

Holy shit this was absolutely based. Why didn't you tell me /lit/?

>dat Judge
>dat Toadvine'
>dat everything