Reader Sympathy: The Kid, the Narrator, and the Reader

Kiefer, Christian. "Unneighborly Behavior: Blood Meridian, Lonesome Dove and the Problem of Reader Sympathy." Southwestern American Literature 33.1 (Fall 2007), 39-52.

Kiefer takes a look at the folly of familiarity suggested by Blood Meridian in the context of the popular Western novel, specifically Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. Both novels were published in 1985 and both incorporate the same terrain and similar tribes of Indians (and the prequels to Lonesome Dove even involve the same time period and mention the mercenary scalp-hunting), and Kiefer proposes that considering these similarities in juxtaposition with the the unique thematic concerns and vastly different narrative styles of the novels presents an interesting study in reader sympathy in relation to the Western. Kiefer is especially interested in discussing the subtly of the differences between Blood Meridian and Lonesome Dove in relation to the reader's experience in order to illuminate the different perspectives on the past and present that both novels represent. Identifying the moral basis of the heroic Western as appealing to reader sympathy (as supported by Lonesome Dove's commercial success compared to that of Blood Meridian), Kiefer examines the ways in which McCarthy uses and alters such Western idioms as morally justified and restrained violence to challenge reader sympathy. Kiefer quotes from the two works and compares the level of conscious reflection of the characters as well as the different approaches to similar conflicts (such as those between rangers and those between a protagonist and a barkeeper). Kiefer sees Blood Meridian's violence as "a violence, in the end, that appears to teach nothing, that imparts no message, other than that violence itself is the great and terrible solution to all, that it is a constant in the affairs of men, and that any act that is not inherently violent is perhaps no true act at all. (42). By exploiting the modern reader's expectations of "stock characters" of history that popular culture (of which Lonesome Dove is an example) has provided, McCarthy encourages a rethinking of not just literary conventions but historical conventions as well; Kiefer proposes that the challenge to reader sympathy in Blood Meridian "necessitates the construction of a new interpretive system" (49) while even criticizing such systems by criticizing itself.

Though many critics have asserted that Blood Meridian is an atypical Western, and cannot in fact be reduced to genre writing at all, the suspended disbelief or disregard for the popular genre in Kiefer's analysis invites a ground-level examination of what is involved in the reader-novel relationship. If characters "who attempt to act with morality tend to be met with death or horror, and what God exists...seems vacant at best or malevolent at worst" (41), the traditional sensitivity or development of understanding of value system that a reader might expect to experience (in a protagonist or anti-hero figure) is thwarted. The kid's violence and the lack of insight into his psyche by the time his first unconscionably violent encounters are described do not allow the reader to forge expected relationships with the text, and are forced to reconsider what the narrator's treatment requires of his audience. The reader must follow the kid's actions and thus engage in a kind of bloody pilgrimage whose direction and reasoning is not self-evident. The lack of binary oppositions in the novel are also identified by Kiefer as challenging reader sympathy, because taking sides is a challenge. The simultaneous alienation and alignment encouraged by the narrator's treatment of the kid illuminates the way that Blood Meridian prompts the reader to consider ethical questions about understanding the past and the possibility of choosing a "good" or "better" path. Kiefer also points out that the narrator has a high degree of self-consciousness, and that the judge is symptomatic of the "anti-text" that the novel also contains (50) as revealed, for example, when he proclaims that “men’s memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not” (Blood Meridian 330). If the judge is an aspect of the narrator's own uncertainty, the instability of familiarity and authority becomes an even more fundamental issue of the narrative.