Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Themes and Symbolism

Overview of Blood Meridian and Its Historical Basis

Cormac McCarthy — a Pulitzer Prize winner for his novel The Road and a highly respected novelist — is said to have conducted extensive research on the history of the Southwest prior to writing Blood Meridian. While the book is fiction, its plot has a firm historical basis. The Mexican-American War, during which the United States annexed Texas, and the concept of Manifest Destiny are definite themes in the novel. There was also a real "Glanton Gang" — a band of rowdy scalp hunters and marauding killers led by John Joel Glanton. McCarthy researched their movements and activities and uses that historical record very effectively in his novel.

The story features a runaway teenage boy known only as "the kid," who was born in Tennessee during the Leonids meteor shower of 1833. The kid meets the novel's most commanding figure, Judge Holden, in Nacogdoches, Texas. Holden — a mysterious, bald, and extraordinarily violent man — is impressed by the kid's fighting ability. The kid joins the Glanton Gang, a group of men who travel into Mexico and become bounty hunters, making their living by killing and scalping Indians. Soon they are killing non-threatening Indians and virtually anyone who crosses their path. The story takes the reader on the kid's adventures across the American West; the constant killing and violence are outrageous and often mindless, but McCarthy's descriptive prose and storytelling gift create a fascinating — if terribly bloody — book. The moral wasteland presented in Blood Meridian would border on the blasphemous if it were not rendered in such original and brilliant prose.

Nietzschean Themes in Blood Meridian

McCarthy infuses Nietzschean philosophy into the novel at numerous points. The Judge, for example, responds to Irving's statement that a man who wins — whether at a card game or in combat — is not "vindicated morally." "Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak," the Judge explains. "A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test" (p. 250). Moreover, the Judge continues, "Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all questions of right" (p. 250). Those remarks could have come directly out of Nietzsche's philosophy. An evil person with twisted values, the Judge nonetheless articulates thoughts that closely embrace Nietzsche's viewpoints.

Scholar Simon Robertson explains that Nietzsche "denies the objectivity of value upon which morality's claim to authority rests" (Robertson, 2009, p. 67). Robertson further writes that Nietzsche's work challenges the foundations "underpinning morality's claim to authority" and that Nietzsche objects to "the ways morality frustrates impersonal goods like excellence" (Robertson, pp. 66–67). The Judge often challenges morality's role in social experience in precisely this spirit. Nietzsche stated, "There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena," and "There are no moral facts whatever. Moral judgment has this in common with religious judgment that it believes in realities which do not exist" (Robertson, p. 69).

Seemingly, the Judge shares the view that morality is more myth than fact, and that the decision as to what is moral is made within the mind of the individual. "Clearly there is no moral hierarchy in Blood Meridian," writes Jason P. Mitchell in the journal Critique (Mitchell, 2000). Mostly, Mitchell continues, "we can only argue that some characters are less inclined toward cruelty than others," which does not exactly echo Nietzsche's view of morality but is close enough to invite meaningful comparison. The Judge — certainly not a figure distinguished by moral restraint — believed that the kid's "moral flaw is precisely his failure to 'empty out his heart into the common'" (McCarthy, p. 307).