Says he loves The Kid as a son

God still wasn't gonna force him do it

Not the original poster, but the entire point of contention which always gets argued around in this debate is whether the Judge is a physical character or a metaphorical one-- Whether the Judge is the doer or the manifestation of other's doings. It does strike me strange though that those who take the physical side never ask about the fate of the young girl, or the meaning of the dwarf prostitute, or discussing who the man urinating outside the jakes is. I don't think that either camp will ever reconcile mostly because each interpretation questions the fundamental nature of the Judge and the book in general.

I command you to not shove your fist into a running blender. Wow, I just forced your hand out of the blender! Oh wait, you didn't want to shove your hand in a blender? Then I guess your and my desires just happened to line up. My "command" didn't involve any force and you were going to do it even if I hadn't given it.

If you were about to put your hand in the blender and then I stopped you from doing it, that would be "forcing" you. No such thing happened in the case of the gospels.

Nigga shut up

I agree that the book is intentionally ambiguous and no single interpretation will be able to reconcile all the details. Regarding the judge and his ontology within the novel, I think there's a bit of both. He does indeed represent the manifestation of evil but he's embodied in a quasi-human form. "Fully man and fully evil," kind of like an inverted Jesus. I think requiring a physical presence is important because the internal logic of the narrative starts to suffer without it.

Consider the story of the Judge creating gunpowder for the lost dudes. Without a physical and independently volitional Judge this scene doesn't really cohere anymore. Who created the gunpowder? Either someone in the troop was somehow suddenly inspired on how to create gunpowder (i.e. the Judge in the story was a representation of either a dude or group of dudes) or the judge himself did it. If the judge didn't do it, someone suddenly obtained obscure alchemical knowledge and got amazing aim. As a third possibility, the person telling the story is lying in part or in whole, which strikes me as a weak explanation because now we're moving beyond the text.

>It does strike me strange though that those who take the physical side never ask about the fate of the young girl, or the meaning of the dwarf prostitute

That's a valid complaint. As far as the young girl goes, my reading was that it's just a reminder of the Judge's evil before he makes his last strike at the kid. At that point in the novel it had been a

The dwarf prostitute is definitely strange but I don't think its a killshot for the "kid is the killer" interpretation. To use that scene as evidence that the kid is the killer requires a very particular interpretation of the facts of the dwarf scene and additional interpretation about motives after that. I find that hard to get behind as a definitive explanation. I think it's more likely one of McCarthy's "explanation killers". By this I mean scenes that preclude any all-encompassing explanations of the work. Consider the scene in "NCfOM" where Chigurh gets into a car accident. Up to that point he had been relatively "invincible" and could be seen as an embodiment of death or some other such concept. When he gets rekt in the car it underlines his finiteness and how he can actually "lose" in a such a mundane way.

Thanks for your insightful post. :-)

The prostitute is not a midget, she was merely petite.

She isn't a midget.

Also they are the same entity so....

So your theory is he ass fucked the man? Kys faggot.

Fuck you for spoiling it you fuck

This is exactly the difficulty of talking about these types of interactions, because some people conceive of this in different ways.

Can you "force" yourself to eat something? Sure, there may be a part of you that finds the experience deeply unpleasant but you wouldn't have done it if there weren't an overriding part of your psyche that desires it. Similarly, any thing that God (or one of the Trinity, if you prefer) does is His will. Otherwise it wouldn't have been done.

Please point me to where I said they engaged in sodomy. The thing about "embracing" is a literal quote from the book. If you read sodomy into that then it's fine but nowhere did I.

My thing was just that there is a complete explanation of the toilet interaction (Judge kills the kid or whatever) without bringing the girl into it.

sooooo...what book are you guys talking about?

I just finished this last night. Why the fuck is that epilogue in there?
And I don't get the ass rape interpretation. I mean the Judge was naked, but he's naked all the time.
It doesn't really matter though, it's more important that the result is unspeakable.
Do you all think the Judge had something to do with the girl disappearing in the end, or did she just run away? It makes sense with his pattern.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Greene

The girl is likely in the outhouse. Nowhere does it imply that the kid is dead. He is the one pissing by the outhouse at the end.

People who pull assrape out of the ending really confuse me. The use of the word "embrace" especially seemed to imply some sort of supernatural act of absorption or destruction. In a book full of graphic descriptions of violence, murder, rape, etc, it seems extremely unlikely that McCarthy would draw the line at sodomy

It also makes the mysterious deaths of the book seem much more sinister, even though I assumed the Judge was the killer the whole time. He simply creates the death in people

What implies that he doesn't? Die and is the man outside?
I'd say the falling stars before he goes in are a pretty big implication he is about to die, considering he was born under falling stars.

>Nowhere does it imply that the kid is dead.

there is that small problem of him not appearing after that scene...that's at least a hint towards him dying

there's also the fact that the kid/the priest were the only ones to resist the judge and if they were in fact both dead that would justify the judge gettin' his groove on in the last scene

>doesn't? Die and is the man outside?
>I'd say the falling stars before he
He is embraced by the judge because he has been corrupted and survived. The other characters who have fallen to the violence the judge compels have all died or been ruined in one way or another. The kid has been successfully consumed and will now proliferate; he is essentially infected with the evil of the judge.

I find this hard to get behind when the kid is actively resisting the judge in the previous scene. The kid says the judge aint nothin and then chucks deuces to him. Then, right after that and without any textual transition he decides to rape/kill a girl and prove the judge right? It seems to defy storytelling sense. For this to make sense there should have been some internal struggle in the kid or at least an acknowlegement of it happening. It would be like if Hamlet decided not to kill Claudius and then the next scene started with him smoking a cigar over his bloody corpse. I'm not saying it's not possible but it's pretty bizarre.

Also unless you want to go the "the whole novel is an analogy" route then it's pretty much just "the judge embraces the kid" that is a metaphor/figurative event. Pretty much the rest of the novel is direct narrative events (or clearly delineated dreams like the "thats what the judge was the judge of" scene). To say that the judge embracing the kid was a figurative event is to subvert that narrative style of the rest of the novel. Is it possible? Sure. Do I think McCarthy would throw in that one scene with a totally different intention on how the reader should interact with it. My guess is probably not. It seems a bit far fetched to me.

Just to be clear I'm not trying to crap on you or tell you that you have bad taste or anything. I think this is an interesting discussion and I'm glad we could have it. Thanks for posting!

I don't have the novel in front of me, but I've read it three times. I may be remembering things incorrectly so cut me some slack here.

The 'embrace' is literal, but it's just a hug. The kid kills the missing girl mentioned earlier in the section. She is who is found in the outhouse. The judge is 'all knowing' w/r/t evil as established in quite a few bits of the novel, including his first introduction. He is aware of the kid's intentions or actions (I can't remember the exact sequence of events, whether the kid's been in the outhouse or not). The judge celebrates because he the kid is the only one who survived, and he has finally come under the judge's sway after all these years.

It's possible I could be way off, but I have seen the theory (or something like it) above mentioned by more than a few people on these boards and others, so it can't be totally crazy.

None of the violence in the book even phased me but when it got to the fucking bear dying I almost bawled

I don't think the theory is impossible, I just find it unlikely given the stuff I've listed. To be fair my most recent reading is about a year ago at this point so it's definitely possible I've missed some subtle points. Thanks for the discussion!

The kids sister is also missing too...spooky

use spoilers you dumb cunt

Anybody who thinks the Kid survives, or murders the little girl, needs to lay off the mescaline.

>reading for plot

>knowing the name of a sub reddit

>being able to recognize that as a subreddit

The mutilated body of a man isn't going to inspire the same kind of horror in onlookers as that of a young girl.

>knowing that I'm correct in my recognition of the aforementioned purported reddit
kys

>knowing that reddit is purported

> getting your scrotum this shredded over reddit

>knowing that I have a shredded scrotum, something only people who follow my activity on reddit know
kys

>not knowing the meaning of the word purported

>using greentext outside of /r/Veeky Forums
off yourself

Why do people think that the Kid couldn't get it up with the dwarf?

Because she wasn't a real child.

Yeah, but I was of the impression he finished having sex with her

Blood Meridian or the Feminist Modern Art Painting in the West.

Read a fucking book for once in your life of fuck off back to pol9k

...

The dwarf prostitute is clearly meant to parallel the little girl with the bear. But it also seems clear that the bear itself parallels the Man. The bear is a predator that has lost its bite, by being tamed, which is a disgrace to the Judge since for him war and the cycle of death is everything. The Man is similar to the bear in that he's "tame" and disappoints the Judge. The Man's impotence in bed with the prostitute shows this same lack of virility shared with the bear. The "ritual" the Judge speaks of is simply his murder of the Man, and the bear's killing is part of this ritual as a foreshadow. The first image we immediately see after the Judge meets the Man in the outhouse is the dead bear. The two men seeking to buy the bear's hide I believe are meant to parallel the soldiers who gambled for Christ's clothes. So, the Man is a Christ figure. The little girl I see as a symbol of innocence, a kind of handmaiden to the bear's tameness. Also perhaps a Marian figure, as the bear's mourner, going with the Christ analogy. Which may relate Mary Magdalene to the dwarf prostitute.

>parallel the little girl with the bear. But it also seems clear that the bear itself parallels the Man. The bear is a predator that has lost its bite, by being tamed, which is a disgrace to the Judge since for him war and the cycle of death is everything. The Man is similar to the bear in that he's "tame" and disappoints the Judge. The Man's impotence in bed with the prostitute shows this same lack of virility shared with the bear. The "ritual" the Judge speaks of is simply his murder of the Man, and the bear's killing is part of this ritual as a foreshadow. The first image we immediately see after the Judge meets the Man in the outhouse is the dead bear. The two men seeking to buy the bear's hide I believe are meant to parallel the soldiers who gambled for Christ's clothes. So, the Man is a Christ figure. The little girl I see as a symbol of innocence, a kind of handmaiden to the bear's tameness. Also perhaps a Marian figure, as the bear's mourner, going with the Christ analogy. Which may relate Mary Magdalene to the dwarf prostitute.

This points to my theory (the above user talking bout the girl being in there). The only valid thing I could see other than the girl would be the judge raping the man. I just read the last few pages. The judge 'stands up and takes the man in his arms' and then locks them both in the jakes. This is all we see of interaction between the two. This does seem to point toward raping and killing, but for the men to be able to look inside the raping must not be going on anymore so it would likely be just a dead body, which, again, seems unlikely that it would disturb them so.

The kid being dead is a possibility but look at the textual arguments for the girl. On the first page of the book the kid is noted as having a sister he'll not see again...on almost the last page we see the kid be taken with a dwarf prostitute and then on the last page we are told that a young girl has gone missing. Throughout the novel young girls go missing when the gang is around.

The judge/kid hug at the end seems to be more of a congratulatory thing when viewing it from my theory. The kid was the only one who survived the infection of violence, unlike the other members of the gang. None of them could take it so to speak. The kid survived the judge (evil incarnate, whatever) and went on to proliferate in the world. The judge celebrates this afterward.

Sorry, quoted the wrong post, meant to quote the one saying the little girl would disturb the men more than a dead body would.

> On the first page of the book the kid is noted as having a sister he'll not see again

Isn't that just because he leaves home, not because he kills her?

> Throughout the novel young girls go missing when the gang is around

True, but isn't this only when the judge is there also? Is there an instance where the judge is not present and a child goes missing? If there are no such instances then the explanation for the disappearances is likely the judge directly.

Ehh, the sister thing isn't necessarily saying that he kills her, it just plants the seed of young girls being tied to the kid, at both the beginning and the end of the novel.

The argument regarding the judge killing the girls....i can see it, but iirc, there's a scene where we see the judge take an indian boy or something....does he kill the kid, or is it implied he raped him? I don't remember exactly, but in my head it led me to believe that they probably would have shown the judge do it, if they showed him to it to the child they would have at least pointed to him doing it to the girls. Idk.

>The judge 'stands up and takes the man in his arms' and then locks them both in the jakes.
Why should we consider what happens in the jakes to be a purely physical phenomenon (murder, rape, or so on) when the Judge has been established as a figure that transcends the crude matter of mere flesh? I've come around to entertaining a more mystical interpretation of events - a sort of induction or merging similar to the myths of the evil wizened who possess younger hosts in order to maintain their immortality.

This is fine, but then what do the men see in the jakes? Is it some deformed husk of the man? Or the spiritual remnants of the embrace of man and judge? What do you think?

the judge exists as a duality, both his physical, imminent presence, but also his symbolic representation of nature's innate state of violence. as the novel converges onto its ending, he seemingly transcends both these aspects and exists, more than anything, as a 'being' of ideas, words to be more exact. his presence confronts the reader directly. i think it's absolutely baffling that someone can take the "embrace" that happens in the outhouse as anything purely physical, meaning that the judge killed/sodomized/did something horrible to the man.

every confrontation between the kid/man and the priest has been one where the priest far more represents his archetype. i think this does not change in the ending of the novel. here's where i think it's far more convincing than anything else: why does the novel end with the judge insisting that he will never die while dancing?

You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.
Even a dumb animal can dance.
The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that dont.

the kid/man always denied the judge, in more ways than one. the judge even accuses him that he had mutiny in his heart iirc, for the mercy the kid had shown. i would then look at the motives of the judge. would some sort of physical subjugation, where he sodomizes/murders the kid, be of his character? i'd say no. he would want the kid/man to betray the goodness in his heart. the judge exists far more as an idea at this point regardless. the dance is eternal for the judge, for he has, and has always been, of a pure nature, a pure violence. he makes the kid indulge into his desires. i've always thought there were slight pedophilic tones applied to the judge throughout the novel, but now i think it might be the projection of the kid himself upon the judge. it seems that to the judge, making the kid indulge in that perversion of goodness would be the highest victory.

You're not God tho.

Jesus was God, though. So in that guy's example it's one human interacting with another. In the other case of the Bible it's God interacting with himself so the ontological parity is maintained.