The Judge, the Idiot, and Cormac McCarhty’s Critique of Violence in Blood Meridian
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7764/ESLA.61905Keywords:
VIOLENCE, THE JUDGE, THE IDIOT, BLOOD MERIDIANAbstract
The following paper examines the relation between the couple made up by Judge Holden and the Idiot in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. Set in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the mid-nineteenth century, McCarthy’s novel is an exploration of the violence underlying the march of American colonial westward expansion in which Judge Holden is a symbol of the desire to dominate others through the use of violence. As such, Holden is confronted and complemented by the figure of the Idiot. The latter works as a degraded, helpless and even more grotesque version of the Judge, and throughout the novel parallelisms and contrasts are established between the two characters. In many passages one mirrors the other; at other times, both make up a unity that reveals the full extent of Holden’s brutal ideology, with the idiot as its mute critic. Finally, the relations that this paper aims to expose may be read as a commentary on the irrationality of a philosophy that celebrates and legitimizes violence not only as a goal in itself, but also as the only way in which human beings can relate to one another.
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