/lit/ - Literature

Y'know I tried reading through this, but I found it really difficult to keep track of who was speaking or what the hell was going on.

>>17759201
So write things down.

>>17759185
>It seems really out of character
I don’t know if this is bait, but that doesn’t seem out of character for the judge at all.
Either way, I think the man got raped and killed by the judge at the end sadly because the kid is my favorite /lit/ character but there are a few alternative theories that could work.
One of them is that the judge was never at the saloon and was just a figment of the man’s imagination. This says the man was the one secretly killing children throughout the novel and the ending by confrontation with the judge is him abandoning his morals and giving himself fully to evil.

>>17759201
McCarthy does away with a lot of proper grammar and punctuation, so that may have been the cause of some of it. However, as for not knowing what's going on, I think a lot of that is intentional. The events taking place feel like a fever dream spiraling down into madness over the course of the book.

>>17759205
Why would I write things down?

>>17759274
Then don't read the book.

>>17759269
>I don’t know if this is bait, but that doesn’t seem out of character for the judge at all.
I'm don't see it. The judge is only ever implied to rape children. Is there ever a point in the story where he rapes full grown men? It feels like weird projection to me. Yeah he's naked, but he's naked for like half the book.

>>17759288
>Then don't read the book.
I probably won't honestly, or at least not for a while. I read for enjoyment. If I can't understand the book, it's not enjoyable. If I have to take notes, then it becomes homework, and is no longer enjoyable. Simple as.
I'll read something more personally valuable in the meantime.

>>17759274
it's nice to write some good passages down into a paper. I have a small notebook for that. I take notes, sometimes write my thoughts into it. it's better than just consigning the book to the back of your mind to be forgotten

>>17759329
Something like pic related might be more your speed, bro. Blood Meridian should not be a hard read.

>>17759341
Well that's different, I also have a notebook where I write down poems and particular prose passages I really like. But if I have to take notes as I'm reading just to figure out what I'm reading, I'd rather just read something else.

>>17759373
I remember enjoying this book when I was a tot, so based on that I'd say that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is better than Blood Meridian.

>>17759399
Don't listen to that insecure cuck faggot OP, just read something else that you'll enjoy more

I don’t know have a clue. I loved this book. I never would have heard of it if it wasn’t for /lit/.

>>17759490
I read the book because pic related read the war sermon on one of his vids.

but /lit/ is the only place where you can talk about blood meridian

>>17759185
I’ve tried reading this multiple times but the writing is atrocious, especially coming from nearby a decade of reading 19th century lit

>>17759538
filtared.

>>17759185
>I was surprised to see so many people assume the
It's because of like one single review some dude wrote where he let his own homoerotic fantasies somehow imprint on the book. Everyone else just parrots that "interpretation" now.

>>17759538
I thought that too, but if you hear it as a guy narrating in a southern accent, it clicks

>>17759538
>the writing is atrocious
this is not a valid complaint, the problem is on your end

>>17759201
>>17759329
>>17759538
ITT: literal brainlets

saying BM is a bad novel or saying that you didn't like it is one thing, but saying you didn't like it *because you didn't understand it* just means you might legitimately be mentally handicapped

>>17759521
>I’m an enormous faggot please rape my face incarnate

>>17759583
he's right you know. the judge would be the 1st to agree

>>17759185
I already explained it many threads ago. The conventional answer is that the Judge buttrapes the Kid, but in actuality he opens his maw to consume him in the reality of war, showing him that those who indeed live by the sword die by the sword.

The epilogue is often seen as cryptic, but to me it is indisputably obvious. As the workers lay down railroad tracks, above the bones of the slain Natives, it betokens the way in which the brutal chaos of war forges the ordered destiny of nation states. The Judge knows why he wages violence, understands its perverse logic, while the Kid, (now the Man) sees it only as a game, an end in itself. He is never able to grasp the Judge's demiurgic, corrupted wisdom that to destroy is also to create, to make way for new creation. The Kid is the dumb, selfish gunslinger, absorbed in his own life. Like all the other characters save for the Judge and Tobin, he lacks consciousness. Tobin is cast away like a shadow before the Judge, and only the Kid, in his instinctual wits and cunning, stands before him as the last remaining loose end. In his defiance of the Judge and his stubborn refusal to die in battle, the Judge baptizes the Kid in the annihilation of nihilism, opening his infinite maw to suck the Kid into his black hole of a mind, vaporizing him completely. The inexorability of war allows that none can escape it, even its survivors. War is God.

>>17759559
yes, the judge is clearly not physically there during the 2nd part of the book after the kid escapes him. lot's of people just don't have imagination

>>17759294
He did probably rape the shit-covered retard at the yuma ferry.

>>17759269
Idk that theory doesn't really make sense, unless you interpret for example the priest telling the kid to shoot the judge in the desert in some metaphoric way. Same for the gunpowder story, or really all of it desu. Holden is clearly an extant character.

the judge literally calls the kid "the dauphin" in the last chapter. which is the word used for the heir to the french king. why is that?

>>17759599
I find it both odd and also somehow comforting that 'death and industrialization' is man's true purpose according to the judge, because it's a conclusion I reached a while before reading the book.

>>17759623
the judge is real while the kid is still at with the scalphunters but in the last part he's not there. he probably died in the desert.
in jail and in the whorehouse the judge becomes just a feverish idea and a metaphor for eternal war

>>17759185
>Judge represents evil
>Kid and the Priest were the only 2 characters to resist the Judge, hence why the Judge attacks them but lets Toadvine and the other guy live.
>Kid gives into evil at end at rapes the girl.

>>17759662
He would have had to be killed by David Brown then who was on his way back and met the kid and priest. Nah I think he just really can not die. Makes more sense than anything else. For him to be the literal embodiment of war. Yaldabaoth in the flesh.

>>17759673
>Nah I think he just really can not die
it's obviously a metaphor, some anon in a thread described the judge as a guy who read too much Heraclius and came to the conclusion that the purpose of man was conflict and war. but he was highly persuasive and his sermons, combined with the violence drove the kid and the rest of the crew insane

>>17759719
The gunpowder story is what convinced me. The only rock in the entire desert, and he sits on it patiently. Sure there's metaphor in there, but he's also clearly a superhuman kind of character.

From page 322:
>In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who could come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at least darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.
The judge defies categorization and throughout the book he mocks the conceits of men. For example, he mocks their concept of law and justice by using verbal sorcery on lieutenant Couts in Tucson after Blackson had murdered Owens, the restaurant owner, in order to get him to doubt his authority to take anyone into custody over the murder. The judge mocks the idea of barter, exchange, and economy by paying an outrageously high sum for the two puppies and then immediately throwing them in the water, and he also mocks this conceit as well as men's greed by buying Toadvine's hat from him for hundreds of dollars. He mocks man's ideas of truth and fairness when he makes false accusations against Reverend Green and incites a mob against him on entirely false charges.

Here is my opinion, or at least, some of my recent thoughts. Accepting (at least in part), a somewhat gnostic interpretation (disclaimer: the only gnostic writings I have read are an english translation of the Apocryphon of John from the Nag Hammadi library website), I can see the judge as being a sort of Yaldabaoth or anti-christ figure. He is the anti-christ in that he seeks not to redeem men but to convince them to debase themselves, to sin against other people, to lie, to cheat, to murder, to rape, to destroy themselves. He amuses himself in throwing pearls before swine by giving technical lectures on geology or anthropology to largely illiterate troglodyte thugs. He mocks god by working to become "suzerain" over all creation, but I don't think he really cares that much about the details as much as the exercise of his power over other things. In a way I think the judge is mocking the demiurge himself by playing out his conceits of being suzerain over the earth, mocking the very idea of dominion by acting like drawing pictures and stuffing birds makes him a god.

The judge is such a rich and mysterious character, I could speculate about him for hours. Frankly I think the idea that the judge is just a very clever man is ridiculous and completely missing the point of the novel. I won't pretend to act like I think I know exactly what the point of the work is. I really love this novel. All my life I enjoyed reading but rarely thought much of a book after I read it, but Blood Meridian has me almost obsessed.

>>17759634
Lookup the history of mexican american civil war and what role the frogs had to play.

>>17759521
Who's that?

>>17759538
>reading high flown limp wrists for a decade
>having problems now
I am afraid you have been turned into an aristocrat of gay, anon.

>>17759185
S O D O M Y

>The strangest passage in Blood Meridian, the epilogue, is set at dawn, where a nameless man progresses over a plain by means of holes that he makes in the rocky ground. Employing a two-handled implement, the man strikes “the fire out of the rock which God has put there.” Around the man are wanderers searching for bones, and he continues to strike fire in the holes, and then they move on. And that is all.

>The subtitle of Blood Meridian is The Evening Redness in the West, which belongs to the Judge, last survivor of the Glanton gang. Perhaps all that the reader can surmise with some certainty is that the man striking fire in the rock at dawn is an opposing figure in regard to the evening redness in the West. The Judge never sleeps, and perhaps will never die, but a new Prometheus may be rising to go up against him.

https://lithub.com/harold-bloom-on-cormac-mccarthy-true-heir-to-melville-and-faulkner/

>>17759599
you really liked this book.

>>17759599
How does that chuck with the war sermon in which the judge explains that war is the ultimate game, waiting for mankind? It would seem his sermon was intended to explain that war was an end in itself.

>>17760896
>listening to bloom

>>17760870
You say aristocrat like it’s a bad thing. I don’t mind the folky style, I’m a big fan of Steinbeck, but the few pages I read reminded me of a Ford advertisement or something, I’ll give it another shot after Atomised

>>17760970
Your father walked away at 5, hell of a dad thing

What did the ex-priest mean by this? Can someone explain this to an 89IQ?

The prose davy!

>>17760870
McCarthy sucks donkey schlong and you should be ashamed for liking this juvenile trash.

>>17761875
Defending your aristocrat i see.

>>17760896
>the strangest passage

not even close lol

>>17761957
I'm not him you dumb cuck.

>>17762012
You are a retard with no reading comprehension. I know you aren't him you dumb cuck

>dumbass doesn't know the difference between aristocrat and aristocracy
Oh boy, no wonder you didn't like the book. You can't even read.

>>17759185
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmDDw4yf7-M

>>17759185
There's a big hint is in the first page which should shed some light on the ending. Read the first page very carefully.

>>17762682
god how the stars did fall

>>17759983
Posts like this make me love this board. Think I’ve seen you reply on other threads about BM, this seems similar to other replies I’ve read.

I agree completely with the interpretation of Holden as an anti christ. I think that’s a pretty common interpretation. I always liked to think that the way the book opens, “thirty three. Night of your north. God how the stars did fall” indicates that Holden is sort of a fallen angel. Despite all the accounts of him being alive and present in the world much before 1833.

>Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.

>>1776311
you deserve to be raped to death by the judge as do all basedposters. fuck you fuck your whole lineage fuck your mother and fuck your father for spawninag a waste of life like you

>basedposters
I hate the mods so fucking much

>>17763674
>>17763759
Calm down. It's just a drawing.

>you deserve to be raped to death by the judge as do all basedposters. fuck you fuck your whole lineage fuck your mother and fuck your father for spawninag a waste of life like you

>>17763894
I hate it and everyone who posts it. it's the ultimate expression of the American anti-intellectual culture and the the constant mania Americans have to be seen "cool", the ultimate expression of the horrible fear they have of being seen of ever caring or thinking about anything. someone should just nuke that satanic nation and deliver the world from the misery and evil it brings

>>17763940
have sex bruh

>>17763940
based

>>17763940
Holy cringe!

>I hate it and everyone who posts it. it's the ultimate expression of the American anti-intellectual culture and the the constant mania Americans have to be seen "cool", the ultimate expression of the horrible fear they have of being seen of ever caring or thinking about anything. someone should just nuke that satanic nation and deliver the world from the misery and evil it brings

>>17763948
never. it would distract me from my full dedication to the intelectual pursuit of posting and arguing on the internet

>>17763972
literal fucking autism. you and all your kind should be sterilized and lobotomized

What edition is that? Honestly I feel I got scammed

>>17764003
>Look at dis dude. Skinny white boy wit' dem raggedy ass dirty clothes. He be fuelin' the washing room fah. Ousside dere be dark fields fo' growin' shit covered in snow here 'n dere, and beyond dere be forests wit' like a few wolves prolly. His peeps be all woodcuttin and water-heavin but actually his dad wuz a schoolmassah. He be drank off his ass, quotin poets who ain't got no recognition no mo. The boy crouchin by the fah and he be watchin em

>>17764088
NICE

ayo, war is kang, nom sayin? yous got weak nigguhs, yous got strong nigguhs, but war dat shit force em together nahmean.

>>17763940
Hey buddy, I think you got the wrong board. /pol/ is two clicks down.

>>17759201
Imagine what your mind will do when you read Gass.

Why was the kid such an asshole and wouldn't let sproule use his shirt to drink water?

>>17764149
every board is infested with fucking basedposters. and why is that claim pol-related? did I ever mention any semitic peoples?

>>17764545
Shut the fuck up about it if it hurts your damn feelings so much. /pol/ is the screeching faggot containment board, go there and stay go

>>17764588
the screeching sojposters are the ones who should go back there I just wanted to talk about the fucking book

>>17764597
Not him, but you can start by doing that instead of what you are doing now.

>>17764597
Show us the book related posts you've made in this thread. Link them right now and prove it.

“This is the nature of farming, whose soil is at once the seed and the feed and the suck. Seen so, fucking is the truest form of farming. It is the gucci loafers of one's PH and the gummy bears of another within that larger sneed which because it binds chuck is therefore forced to suck. Fuck is the ultimate game because seed is at last a forcing of the gummy bear of existence. Chuck is god.”

>>17764088
Audible kek. Thanks

>>17764616

all me:
>>17759341
>>17759521
>>17759605
>>17759634
>>17759662
>>17759719

>>17762698
that's a great phrase but I think he meant the part "in him already existed a taste for mindless violence: the kid, the father of the man"

>>17764705
Oh, you're just a dumbass.

>>17764723
fuck you this board would be nothing without me

>>17764790
Calm down. Explain why you think the judge isn't there at the end and just a hallucination. The whole
>it's a metaphor for how evil corrupts all men
Thing seems to clichee

>>17759521
Did he? Lol why?

>>17763111
MacCarthy is a Christian, The Judge isn't a mouthpiece for the authour.

>>17759983
Saved.
>I think the judge is mocking the demiurge
This is the idea I got of the Judge. It's easy to follow a gnostic interpretation of the Judge, but most consider him to be the Demiurge incarnate. I like to think that he's a human, the simplest, most human among humans in the book, who severed his link to the tyrannous stars and became free. A gnostic himself. He can not die because he is not bound by the rules of life, the rules of the Demiurge. Everything he does is in complete defiance to the logical pillars of the world, he acts as chaos against the order structured by the stars. He does commit "evil acts", but good-evil dualism is still one of the said pillars which he mocks and shits upon.
He polarizes the whole story because as he is freed from the chains of archons he gains godlike gravity himself, a Satan (adversary) to the God, a God which is made of suffered life and inevitable death and natural laws which the Judge mocks as he throws them to swine, as you said.

The real Judge