ABSTRACT
When a writer presents the concepts of Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" as directly as does Cormac McCarthy in the first books of his border trilogy, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, he must create a complex dilemma for himself. The writer, then, who wishes to expose these illusional truths would, of necessity, place readers in their midst where we are "enchanted with happiness" when the "rhapsodist" tells us epic fables "as if they were true". However, Nietzsche speaks of possibilities for individuals perceiving themselves as if "laid out in a lighted display case". Everything about McCarthy's fiction suggests that he has peered down that crack, that he understands society's illusory truth. Linking Nietzschean concepts to chaos theory and then to McCarthy's exposure of the illusional truths of the Southwest, it seems that all three as similar theoretical activities.
