/lit/ - Literature

>>19634379
why do you think death for the Kid is punishment? if he was repentant and killed, wouldn't his soul go to heaven?

>>19634379
i agree a little but i think theres more to the ending of blood meridian than just "violence wins, morality loses"

The judge is a gnostic archon or some shit. The kid being killed only after he found morality means he has a chance to escape the material world instead of reincarnating.

>>19634379
I think OP is a faggot

>>19634379
It also has to do with the christian values of The Road. While the judge is demonic in his nature, the nature of the father is the one of a Saint.

>>19634379
I think BM deals with the carnage that anticipates civilization (which is what the epilogue might be about), while The Road is obviously about the end of it. I recently read a very good book on McCarthy's ontology in The Road. The book posits that McCarthy's extreme insistence on monosyllabic but highly lyrical word choices is meant as an ode to the "salitter that is drying up", to quote from the novel. Language has broken up into its constituents (the syllables) but his use is very poetic and beautiful, to metaphorically represent the salitter leaving the world and might be symbolic of the beautiful Father-son bond that was to end by the end of the book. This doesn't explain the final passage though, which is very poetic. Maybe civilization returns in some manner and the book is cyclic.

I am also fascinated by the narrator in The Road. Who exactly is narrating the book? The names (The man, the boy, the burnt man, the thief, the blind man, the woman) seem right out of a parable but there are many references to modern culture which disorients this interpretation. Could it be that McCarthy imagined the book as a modern parable meant for a future age descended from this one past? One anon once made a good case that The Road is McCarthy's creation of a new foundational myth for the next civilization, replacing Adam and Eve as ours. Adam and eve had everything but they are mislead; but The man and The boy have absolutely nothing, yet they still perserve with their values.

>>19637295
>yet they still perserve [sic] with their values
The man stripped a guy of his clothes and had him die of hypothermia, no?

>>19634379
>literary masterpieces
lol

>>19637388
Trying a new strategy, eh?

>>19637388

>>19637369
It's relative. The Man is not morally comprised to the same degree as the rest of them. The question of values is also relative. He cares and loves his son and would do anything for him. His means are morally ambiguous but their conclusions are morally justified.

>>19634379
I do think there’s much more hope in The Road than in Blood Meridian but I wouldn’t say one is an antithesis of the other. I think they seem to deal with different themes.
The Road is about how goodness can survive even in the most bleak circumstances whereas Blood Meridian is about the nature of evil and its connection to man.

I just finished reading Blood Meridian, can someone help me understand the significance of the judge killing the native child he saved after the first camp they attacked, drowning the puppies and saving the idiot? Were the first two just to highlight his 'evilness'? They both seem pretty performative in the way the judge went about them, like he wanted a reaction
I'm a brainlet so appreciate the help

>>19638714
Reading a book titled Notes on Blood Meridian may help. You should read it anyway, it's a great work.

>>19638714
>drowning the puppies
I have read someone say that it could possibly represent the Judge mocking human concepts of value. He pays an outrageously high price for the puppies and then immediately disposes of them. In this way he shows contempt for the idea that the value of the gold or the puppies was significant. The Judge tends to mock people and ideas throughout the book. Like when he says he'll take out a life insurance policy on David Brown against everything but hanging. He's insulting David as a person in a similar way that he insults ideas and concepts that people hold to be true or self evident.

>>19638714
>>19638758
Sepich's work is great, but is almost entirely focused on the historical facts of McCarthy's narrative. Interpretations in there aren't many (and what are are too general).

>>19638758
>>19638776
Thanks anons, I'll look into it either way
>>19638769
That's interesting, thanks for the interpretation

>>19638714
to quote from this guy >>19637295
>I think BM deals with the carnage that anticipates civilization
the idiot is who remains, because funnily enough they are who will be too incompetent to maintain civilization without end.

If anything, the antithesis to The Road is Outer Dark. At the ending, the character Holme follows a road which leads only to a rank and dismal swamp. There's a pervasive emptiness and nihilism to that journey versus the hope/purpose of the one of the man and the son in The Road. Outer Dark is furthermore an opposite in that the parent fails to protect the child and it's (literally) consumed by evil.

>>19637369
The man is based as hell.
>the world literally ends in front of him
>wife is freaking out in the other room
>he just shrugs and starts collecting water
Ice cold killa yet also somehow one of the warmest characters in fiction with every sentence that he speaks to the boy.