/lit/ - Literature

So, was The Kid the one who was butchering and diddling kids ?

>>15114722
Violence is so prevalent and omnipresent in Blood Meridian that you might consider the Judge not the antagonist of the book, but the world in which the book takes place, or at least the personification of its most fundamental logic.
Blood Meridian is a book about violence and the way it controls Man, about its will to expand and encompass everything ("Those birds' freedom offends me") only to destroy everything it comes into contact with (as exemplified by the Judge and his habit of studying things before destroying them).
>"Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth."

People who complain about its "gratuitous violence" don't get that violence is the main character and the theme and the stage. The violence in this book is essential and inevitable. Like in life. Blood Meridian becomes therefore a microcosm of the world and of every man's life. One brutality after another and then you get killed in a toilet by an immortal giant baby.

Regardless of his exact identity, the Judge is clearly a supernatural being, that much is clear, and one of the most memorable characters I've ever come across. But did he have to rape The Kid in that latrine? That felt so gratuitous.