Blood Meridian analysis

What do you think of this analysis from reddit?

The Judge is the avatar of a paleoconservative entity called Death which would see all consciousness expunged, after being rendered completely irrelevant. All things reduced to a self-swallowing process, causes and effects dancing dumbly around the void, an ocean of blood and froth that circles a black hole like a drainspout, on and on until nothing is left but the entity’s reality — none other now possible —and its name, the last word, phonetically sounded in the last language that remains. SILENCE.
Being an avatar, an embodiment, the Judge is able to think and act strategically.
It’s probable he wants the Idiot to have some effect on other men. He intends to use him as a tool, a totem of animal regression. Therefore the leash. The Idiot is of course a person too, but that personhood is what the Judge wants to render utterly useless. Think from his perspective if you can: he can let the Idiot die, or pluck him from that stream of events. If the Idiot died in the river, men might sympathize with the Idiot, who was fascinated by his image in the water, an experience to which they can relate. That is not acceptable to the Judge, so he saves him. I am sure he can be destroyed later in a way that, this time, signifies nothing.

Gay and pseudoscrutinacal

Why and how

*spits*

Meaningless word salad.

>Meaningless

...

You can take any facet of a work of art and tell a story about how it represents X but that doesn't mean your interpretation is grounded in the text, you're just floating around in the realm of symbolic association and rhetoric.

>paleoconservative entity called death
stopped reading there, what the fuck?
you have to go back by the way, never post here again

It's honestly better written than anything I've read on Veeky Forums but I only come here for the memes and self-loathing so I'm not complaining.

It's a shame I can't accept Reddit's layout. It's thematically similar to the Judge's character in a way because it's often like having a conversation straight into a heartless void, as opposed to the regular forum based structure which at least lets a conversation flow in order.

Anyway, I'm only 270 pages into this book.

you should leave and stay on reddit, you'd fit right in, faggot

You're a passive aggressive weirdo.

You're a closet redditor who compulsively reddit spaces

kill yourself virgin

only after I kill you and all the women around you

Why would a paleoconservative want all life in the universe to end?
What kind of hack writes this garbage? Honestly...
It's fucking clear that the Judge is supposed to represent either Satan himself or an embodiment of Satan. Just look at every other work that McCarthy has written, especially No Country For Old Men

SPOILERS FOR NO COUNTRY BELOW.

>moss sticks by his principles and survives close calls
>gets an offer to sacrifice himself for his wife and refuses
>breaks his marriage vows and cheats on is wife
>is punished by god, killed by chigurh
>chigurh kills the wife as promised

I can't say I remember Blood Meridian all that well, and it's clearly not as straightforward as No Country, but the references to the Judge being satanic are all over. Could they be intentionally misleading? Maybe.

Though, personally, I think the kid is the real key to understanding Blood Meridian. I remember when I did my 2nd re-reading I was struck by just how many odd incidents he's involved in.

For example, there's that part where they get fucked up by Indians, and he's (if I remember right) the only one left alive. At the time I couldn't help but wonder if he hadn't in fact died, and come back to life like Christ. Maybe as a kind of Antichrist or some shit.

I don't know. Blood Meridian is weird. And McCarthy is incredibly smart and thoughtful. But if there's anything I can say with certainty, it's that the man sure loves his Bible and his Shakespeare.

/thread

>paleoconservative entity called Death

Stopped reading right there. What a fucking moron.

>not denying it's word salad, which is always meaningless

There goes your ...

There was nothing passive about their aggression. Learn what words mean before you use them.

yup

How the fuck did you manage over four hundred pages of ham-fisted, literally didactic, themes of war and absurdism and come away with pretentious drool about death and nihilism.
The role of the Judge could not be more clear, I don't know how the biblical themes went over your head but he's a satanic figure. "Satan" means "adversary"; the Judge was War incarnate, not Death. He did not want death, he did not want the end of mankind he wanted turmoil, hatred, conflict. The Judge could not exist without Man, he would be rendered a nonentity. That's practically handed to you during his campfire sermons. The reason The Idiot serves as his foil is because The Idiot represents everything opposed to what the Judge stood for. The Idiot had an incapacity to hate. An incapacity for war, for "games". By Holden's measure, the Idiot was not a man, not part of the game. He was outside the Judge's scope.
He was not death incarnate, he was fundamentally an absurdist driven by his determinist beliefs. He was Satan. Read the fucking Bible.

The Idiot is also a jesus figure in Dostoevsky's the Idiot

That's a very good point, I actually thought of him first because I forgot about the Idiot character in BM. been a while since I read it. That definitely sheds relevant light on the character though, especially considering McCarthy cites Dostoyevsky as an influence.
In the Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, many of the other characters see Prince Myshkin's purity and complete lack of malevolence as almost a mental disorder (obviously, hence the title), and that's reflected as a caricature in BM where he is literally an idiot because that's how a perfectly malevolent figure like Holden would view Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin, as a literal retard- less than man because he doesn't participate in the game of War as all men do; Myshkin falls outside of The Judge's boundary of what he considers a "man".
Which is probably why he was so drawn towards him and took care of him. He saw him as some strange artifact. If McCarthy's other works are any indication, it's probably also a subtle implication that love(as represented in Dosto's novel and personified by the Idiot) begets love, even from Judge Holden in some strange way.

So was the epilogue Corncob's typical "carry the fire" schpiel, or was it something more?

I don't think that fire is symbolically consistent between BM and The Road. From what I gather, the fire (sparks from the tool striking the rocks as it digs holes) represent the conflict that is byproduct of man's interaction with nature (God's creation). we cannot interact with the world without there being some sort of destructive fallout. The holes represent man's creation (as opposed to God's). A hole is nothing, which from an existential standpoint is the sum of man's creation: everything we endeavor to create is ultimately nothing. Each hole is identical, a perfect circle at measured increments. This is indicative of the nature of man's creation. We create things on a metric not found in nature. God does not use straight lines or perfect circles or perfect increments. We don't know where the man came from or where he is going, just that he is progressing along, creating perfect holes at perfect increments, striking sparks without realizing it.
I think it's an allegory for the "progress" of mankind. each hole dependant on the hole before, but ultimately identical.
I could be wrong, I only just now read it. I think I skipped it when I finished BM.

Shit, that's good

Damn, boi. Think you nailed it.

Good work, user. I had similar ideas after I finished it.

You can say that, but it belies your inexperience with his other works. The fire appears everywhere from No Country for Old Men to the Border Trilogy, not just The Road.

I think that your reading, though cogent, ignores several aspects of the piece itself. Man has already come into contact with forces greater than him. The Judge, if not the Devil himself, is at least an avatar of war, chaos, entropy, or some other malign force. Conflict with him results in the destruction of the boy, and the human world is unable to affect him while he rampages throughout it.

Similarly, it could be argued, as you do here, that the holes are a grasping, human defacement of God's creation, but much of the work itself is already given over to this idea. Under the leadership of the Judge and Glanton, the gang carves a path of violence through both men and nature. McCarthy isn't one to summarize the languorous dread stretched over 400+ pages into a single image.

The only purpose in showing something like this, something singular, something new, is to show a feeling or idea not yet present, in this case: hope.

Whatever the men are doing, it's clear that the West of old is gone. The two men, the ones without the hole-tool, pick through bones. While desolation has come, it has also gone. These are the survivors, the reminder, perhaps struggling in this world, but no longer in fear of it. The act itself is a real action, obscured by layered of metaphor, but a real action nonetheless. While many say that they may be erecting a fence, an action that divides, allocates, and demystifies the wild, nearly any other action they do also works in this way as well.

That this scene comes after the Judge's most visceral act is not insignificant. He returns after a decade, from nowhere, the same as he is, to brutalize the Kid. The judge is made to be a constant, an insurmountable and dogged force of violence, and yet immediately after this, he's gone. The contrast this creates is too stark not to have meaning; it shows that despite everything, despite seeing the very worst of what this power can do, against all belief it too will vanish against all odds and even its own proclamations.

>You can say that, but it belies your inexperience with his other works.
I can concede to that, I've only read The Road, Outer Dark, and Blood Meridian.
>The only purpose in showing something like this, something singular, something new, is to show a feeling or idea not yet present, in this case: hope
Your interpretation, although the inverse of mine, is equally valid. Equally because McCarthy maintains a neutral tone, restraining from hopeful, or even vaguely benevolent themes for a more objective examination. I don't think there are any implied judgements of mankind's past or future, as those portrayed in the epilogue are referred to as "mechanisms" that are motivated by ideology ("prudence or reflectiveness with no inner reality").
I think McCarthy wrote it purposefully vague, unwieldily obtuse to distance the narrative from both hope and lack of hope. It's simply an act of observation and we know nothing of the observer beyond his report. Hope is a valid interpretation, as is lack of it. McCarthy doesn't paint a picture so much as open a window.
This neutral theme given by a distant, objective observer is certainly indicative of the narrative of the whole novel, but I do agree with you with the idea that the epilogue serves as a shifted perspective on the same theme, but I think that the message of hope leans more heavily on the narrative than it can objectively support