Introduction

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian opens with the narrator’s imperative that we “See the child,” and it is a novel that demands that the reader look beyond the immediate sensory perceptions of the events and characters it describes. In an effort to delve deeper into Blood Meridian, we researched several critical perspectives that address issues that we consider to be central the power and effect of the novel: the narrator's voice, especially as compared to the rhetoric of Judge Holden, and the ethical significance of the relationships involved between the reader, narrator, judge, and kid due to the power of these voices. This blog is an annotated bibliography of the literary criticism that we used, and though the essays compiled here do not necessarily provide answers, we found them useful in informing our consideration of our research question.



Our interest in the rhetoric of Blood Meridian began with the stunning language of the novel. The narrator, an undefined and mysterious entity that possesses expansive knowledge as well as linguistic range, is everywhere felt, and his uncanny voice is matched only in authority and eloquence by that of the most loquacious character, Judge Holden. Despite their similarities, and however compelling the judge’s rhetoric and his uncompromising war-is-god philosophy may be (particularly among otherwise fairly inexpressive characters and in a world dominated by “mindless violence”), Blood Meridian is clearly not narrated by the judge as the narrator subtly defies the judge’s philosophy and refuses to give himself wholly to violence. However, the similarities between the rhetoric of the judge and the narrator are powerful, thus rendering the distinctions between them important to identify and analyze.



Considerations necessary to such an analysis are the narrator’s effect on and relationship with the reader, the reader’s understanding of the judge’s speeches and the relationship of these speeches to the narrator’s philosophy (or his expression of the incomplete nature of philosophies), the effect of the judge’s rhetoric on the other characters and especially the kid, and thus the potential alignment of the reader with the kid as slightly removed participants in menacing linguistic constructions. Because discovering ethical significance in a work of literature involves recognition and reflection, the relationships that exist between the reader and the narrator and the reader and the kid, and thus the relationships between the narrator, kid, and judge, are vital to consider in order to approach the ethical significance of the novel as a whole. 



Critics approach the problems of reader sympathy, the judge’s philosophy, the handling of the plot and inner state of characters, the use and appropriation of language, and the overall questions posed by the novel’s declarations of and lack of solutions for mystery in different ways and through different lenses. Some, such as Bernard Schopen, dissect the formal properties of the novel such as dramatic and textual structure; Georg Guillemin describes McCarthy’s use of setting to provide insight into the characters. Others tackle the Judge as a kind of Gnostic philosopher (Leo Daugherty), or as an Adamic figure (one who gives names to things) who can control the meanings of words (Joshua Masters). Several critics, including David Holloway, Dwight Eddins, and Dana Phillips, examine the novel in terms of (often conflicting) existing criticism and literary theories. The consideration of multifaceted approaches can assist the reader in truly “seeing” what the novel attempts to convey. In not only reading and hearing the words, but analytically seeing the images and critically listening to the voices of Blood Meridian, the ethical implications of the interwoven relationships that tie the reader to the text can begin to be considered.