/lit/ - Literature

>>22145066
>The opening to BM where the drunken father talks about the stars is one of my favorites
I admit I was shocked when I found out that really happened. One of these days someone's going to have to make a study bible for Blood Meridian explaining all the context and allusions McCarthy makes.

>>19962760
Stove here could be the past participle of "stave", which means to break something by piercing it, hence the dipper (an astronomical constellation) is pierced by all the other stars in the sky, it's broken open

The passage as a whole is the father speaking about the night of the kid's birth, a famous meteor shower in 1833. It was so amazing and unusual that papers and books at the time published drawings of it (see pic related). On a thematic level, the kid is born on a night that is not a night, a virtual day-time, which could be said to signify the brightness or 'purity' of his origins that McCarthy is describing (and thus of humanity in general). The falling of the stars foreshadows his subsequent fall from grace. A lot of Miltonian / Biblical allusions to Lucifer here too of course