ABSTRACT
In Blood Meridian, the free will problem manifests itself as a violent clash between nihilistic affirmations of individual agency and the brute fact of external delimitation. James D. Lilley suggests that the "central question of Cormac McCarthy's fiction has always centered on the possibility of agency," but in Blood Meridian, McCarthy also imagines a world in which some of the characters reject the question, opting instead to affirm agency even if it is impossible. The Puritan traditions of determinism and divination that McCarthy draws upon in Blood Meridian thus evolve into a material determinism that reaches its zenith at the close of the twentieth century as the movement of money becomes as certain and inscrutable as the movement of celestial bodies. In McCarthy's Judge Holden, however, solipsism reaches a point where it actually imposes itself on the world by emptying types of their capacity to signify anything but the relentless agency of the subject who knows them.
