…Because I only just read the first chapter, and I know it’s gonna throw me for a loop, but come on. This whole sequence of events feels like a parody of Westerns– Specifically the “everyone in a bar gets into a fight” trope. I feel like it’s playing out like a Three Stooges sketch.
Dude with a penchant for random acts of violence fights sailors because IDK he’s a cowboy I guess. A freaky-looking judge lies about a priest and you get that moment where the music stops and everyone goes “git 'em!” before they all laugh about how they semi-accidentally murdered an innocent man, because violence funny, Mr. Judge just gave them a pretense and they’re greatful.
A guy named Toadvine insists the kid’s in his way. When the kid refuses to move his immediate reaction is an earnest attempt at murder. They flop around in the mud. When the kid wakes up Toadvine is concerned about the possibility that he broke the kid’s neck because, well, that’s not what he was tryin’ to do. Just kill him. No bad blood between them, they trudge through the mud to hand each other their weapons and the kid wordlessly follows Toadvine (I guess they’re friends now), who immediately goes to attack someone else because… who knows why. Pries their eye out.
It really is as if Blood Meridian is depicting the west as one giant stupid bar fight. I wonder if the punchline that it becomes escalatingly awful over time and how dare you glorify stupid random violence like this? or something?
I don’t know, I’m just ranting. This is strange.
No spoilers, but yeah Blood Meridian is a strange book. It felt like a sort of apocalyptic fever dream or something. I pretty quickly stopped trying to apply the logic of our world to it and just went wherever it was taking me lol. It’s a story from some other place I think.
All I remember about Blood Meridian is that Cormac really hated punctuation.
“The writer hated commas and semi colons and full stops and anything that would let a man take rest and contemplate both the novel and his station in life and often to the extent that every paragraph was actually just one endless sentence doing violence to that man’s ability to parse and consider all those elements and often something about bush craft and coffee and something about horses.”
TBF I can appreciate what he’s going for. The lack of quotes makes it less like you’re an omniscient being hearing dialogue, more like the narrator’s just repeating what someone said. I’m in the middle of Alan Wake 2 and I can’t help but read the book in Alan’s VA’s voice because the way “Alan” writes is superficially similar.
It also cranks up the impression that you’re stuck on a nonstop violence train that doesn’t really have any rhyme or reason to it. Just a series of events that occur.
It’s violence escalating over time over and over again, but it seemed to me like McCarthy didn’t want to “condemn” the glorification of it. The book is based on an actual posse of scalphunters, and to me the tone of it all seems to be on par with his other books where the main message you have to get out of it is “the world is a flaming giant turd filled to the brim with violence and hatred and it’s painful to tell you the kind ones aren’t coming out on top”. I hope I made it clear enough.
