ABSTRACT

I had thoroughly prepared to write an essay on “Cormac McCarthy and the American Literary Tradition,” and I did, but with more focus on Herman Melville than I had planned. Originally, I wanted to show how, from The Orchard Keeper up to and including Suttree, McCarthy wrote largely in the tradition of the southern grotesque of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. I also wanted to show that to a certain extent southern features remain in his fiction even after he seems to have exhausted his need for “exuberant violence” in Blood Meridian (Arnold 31). A book I initially found overestimated. I considered it a spaghetti western in print; and the only redeeming feature seemed to be that the land, the West, survives in that novel. Now, twenty-five years later, I see Blood Meridian as an impressive treatment of what is a main theme in American literature from James Fenimore Cooper until today, i.e., man’s inhumanity to man.