r/cormacmccarthy

As a kid my introduction to westerns was John Wayne movies and Louis L'amour books. Which are quite tame in comparison to McCarthy's works

As an adult who has a history degree and personal interest in Plains history specifically since I grew up in an area whose often overlooked history is rife with violence from all sorts perpetrators (Native v Native, army v Native, cattlemen v farmers etc) . I know that the plains and western expansion were bloody and violent affairs. And I welcome the more gritty depictions we've seen in movies such as hostiles and American Primeval since even if they are works of historical fiction, they paint a more accurate picture of the era.

However, these didn't seem to be too popular in the 20th century. The main example I can think of is dances with wolves, but even that was tame compared to reality. But I think it at least tried.

So I guess that was a lot of words to ask, are there other 20th century works outside of McCarthy that are willing to go against the mainstream 20th century depictions of western expansion?

Hi everyone!

This is my first post on reddit. I am looking to study Blood Meridian further. I have found a very small snippet of Chamerlain's memoirs, which unfortunately didnt give much insight into the Glanton gang. I may have got unlucky as it was just from a magazine published many years ago.

My question is - does anyone know how to access the full memoirs or can tell me if they are worth pursuing? Thank you in advance

Im currently reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck, recently trying to shift from epic fantasy, thrillers, horror etc to more for lack of better words mature literature and trying to read more literary fiction.

Many people suggested Cormac Mccarthy to me and im really looking forward to reading his work but dont know where to start...

could anyone like give me a rough framework of how i should go about reading his work?

Hello everyone !

Pretty self-explantory title but I'll just add that I'm not a massive reader so I havent read books this dense writing-wise before. My understanding of the vocabulary is enough to understand the general idea of passages and enough to actually enjoy it (Yes I started reading it already).

I'm asking this because I'm the type of persons who hyperfixates on each word they come across and dont undestand and I have never used english anywhere other than school and internet, which means I have 0 ideas what some expressions mean, might get confused by accents etc.

Just to give you guys a general idea. And thank you in advance !

In chapter XII, the gang travels East in pursuit of the Apache from the Gila wilderness after the bear eats the Delaware. After they find the dead argonauts, they travel four hours south to find the camp. I’m trying to find where that would logically be on Google earth but I don’t actually see any water in a place where I think it would make any sense. It can’t be the caballo reservoir; that didn’t exist prior to the dam and was too big anyway. They don’t cross the Rio grande so there’s a limited amount of space for it to arrive. Is it a temporary floodplain lake? Am I off? The Bosque Del Apache, maybe?

I recently read Moby-Dick for the first time and am now completely obsessed with it, both for its own sake and for how it changed my understanding of Blood Meridian. For those who don’t know, Blood Meridian is deeply influenced by Moby-Dick. Honestly that’s an understatement, it’s like they’re two parts of a whole. I got the impression McCarthy absorbed every page and then crafted his own story with the same astonishingly self-consistent logic.

There is symbolism in Blood Meridan that McCarthy uses but, as far as I’ve found, doesn’t provide many tools to interpret, because those tools are in Moby-Dick. Symbolism like food and drink, smoke and smoking, fire with real companionship, lightning, the wind, water and the ocean, foreheads (really, there’s a whole chapter on forehead symbolism in Moby-Dick called “The Battering Ram”), encirclement, and on and on.

The parallels, direct references, adaptations and changes, the progenitors of even specific sentences, for the entire book I couldn’t believe what I was reading. From the very first sentences, “Call me Ishmael.” and “See the child.”, McCarthy is building on Melville’s masterpiece.

If you want to know more about the ubiquitous line imagery in Blood Meridian, that dividing line between earth and sky, light and dark, past and present, on the book cover, in the title, appearing over and over again, well there’s a chapter in Moby-Dick for that. It’s called “The Line”, and it’s about the line of rope by which a harpooned whale tows a boat that’s hunting it. I don’t think it’s comprehensive, I don’t think anything could be a comprehensive explanation of such a broad symbol, but it’s a lot.

Reading Moby-Dick honestly raised more questions than it answered and made it clear that there’s heaps of symbolism in Blood Meridian I didn’t even know that I didn’t know. I’ve been obsessed with Blood Meridian for about 5 years now, but apparently I’m just getting started.

I just finished Blood Meridian...

It's easily one of the most impactful novels I've ever read. Absolutely loved it. I could go on and on about how great it is, as I'm sure most of the users in sub would too.

But I have to say, I feel absolutely exhausted now that I've finished it. It was one of the darkest stories I've experienced, sure, but it's not because of that. This book is just sooooo expansive and dense. It didn't take me terribly long to finish it (a little over a month), but it feels like I've been on this journey for many months.

I just felt like posting this because I see so many people captured by this novel that it made them re-read it multiple times and, alrhough this book was definitely right up my alley, I can't imagine myself picking it up again for at least several months. And now I almost feel like I'm lazy for not wanting to dig in deeper, lol. Because I definetely want to revisit this in the future, but not sure when...

Anyway, just needed to get this out there. How do you guys do it?? Seriously, this felt almost overwhelming.

Fantastic stuff!! Definitely re-readable, but damn. It's an undertaking.