Annotated Bibliography
“The Border Trilogy: A Theology of Loss”
Adam S. Miller
Arnold, Edwin and Dianne Luce. A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Arnold and Luce’s A Cormac McCarthy Companion includes nine independently authored
essays that explore, from a literary perspective, key themes in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.
The collection explores the role of autotextuality, dialogic imagination, the oneiric, violence,
pastoralism, allegory, ethics, cowboy codes, and McCarthy’s marginalization of feminine
perspectives. Together the essays offer a useful overview of the range of critical responses to
McCarthy’s fiction.
Boguta-Marchel, Hanna. The Evil, the Fated, the Biblical: The Latent Metaphysics of Cormac
McCarthy. London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
Boguta-Marchel’s study is especially germane to an examination of religious themes in
McCarthy’s work. Her book adopts an explicitly “existentialist theological” approach. It has
long been noted that McCarthy’s novels have a distinctively “biblical” character not only in
terms of their content but, especially, in terms of their spare and enigmatic prose. Biblical
allusions are persistent and intentional. Boguta-Marchel gathers these observations and puts
them to work in her examination of McCarthy’s treatments of the “problem of evil,” the
reality of loss and suffering, and the indifference of the natural world to human hopes and
ideals.
Broncano, Manuel. Religion in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction: Apocryphal Borderlands. New
York: Routledge, 2013.
Broncano positions his study of religion in McCarthy’s fiction as a response to those who
find that McCarthy’s persistent flirtation with nihilism leaves little room for a serious
consideration of theological ideas. Broncano suggests that McCarthy should be seen as
offering an “apocryphal narrative of the American Southwest.” Herman Melville, in
particular, offers crucial context for understanding McCarthy’s intentional reworking of
biblical themes. Broncano’s study follows the arc of McCarthy’s work from Blood Meridian
to the Border Trilogy through the Pulitzer Prize winning The Road.
Lincoln, Kenneth. Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009.
Lincoln’s American Canticles is especially useful as a critical overview of McCarthy’s entire
oeuvre. It covers not only McCarthy’s later and better known novels set in the American
Southwest but his cycle of earlier novels that are all located in the American South. Lincoln
reads McCarthy’s work as a series of canticles that mix biblical lyricism with a hard look at
the grief and suffering endemic to human experience. Lincoln also sets McCarthy’s work
firmly in the general context of scholarship addressing Western Americana and Native
American studies.
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage, 1993.
All the Pretty Horses is the first volume McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. The novel won the
National Book Award for fiction in 1992. The novel follows John Grady Cole’s attempt to
recover the kind of “cowboy” life that, even in the 1950s, is fading in America. Just sixteen,
Cole crosses the border into Mexico with two companions to find work on a ranch in the
mountains. While often lighter and more hopeful than much of McCarthy’s fiction, the novel
nonetheless culminates in Cole’s loss of his love, his work, and nearly his life.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage,
1992.
Literary critic Harold Bloom has called Blood Meridian one of the greatest 20th Century
novels. The novel is unsparing in its depiction of the “Glanton gang,” a group of scalp
hunters who roamed the Texas/Mexico border in the 1850s murdering and pillaging Texans,
Mexicans, and Native Americans alike. The story is told primarily from the perspective a
character only identified as “the kid,” but the book’s plot is driven and dominated by Judge
Holden, a brilliant and ruthless avatar of pure will to power. Philosophically, the book traces
a dialectic between the strong force of the Judge’s nihilism and the weak force of the kid’s
complicit but eventually divergent pursuit of something more than survival.
McCarthy, Cormac. Cities of the Plain. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Cities of the Plain is the third volume in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. The novel brings
together the protagonists of the trilogy’s first two volumes, John Grady Cole and Billy
Parham. Cole and Parham have found work at a failing ranch in New Mexico. Cole, though,
has fallen in love with an epileptic Mexican prostitute. He makes plans to rescue her from the
scoundrel that runs her brothel and marry her. But ultimately the woman is murdered and
Cole is killed in a knife fight. The novel is powerful exploration of both the beauty and
futility of Cole’s romanticism. It concludes with a brief but powerful compression of the
remaining fifty years of Parham’s life and a last, nearly mythological conversation with a
man who, like Parham, is homeless and wandering.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. New York: Vintage, 1995.
The Crossing is the second volume in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. It is the longest, least
narrative, and most potently philosophical of the set. This novel, like all the novels in the
trilogy, involves a series of border crossings between the United States and Mexico. Billy
Parham lives on a ranch near the border. Tasked with tracking and killing a wolf that has
been killing their family’s cattle, Parham becomes fascinated with the purity of the wolf’s
wildness and finds himself unable to kill her. He sets out on an ill-fated journey to, instead,
release the wolf in the mountains of Mexico. The wolf, though, is stolen, Parham gets lost in
the mountains, and when he finally returns home, he finds that his parents were murdered in
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his absence. Parham and his brother then return to Mexico in an attempt to recover their
family’s stolen horses. Parham’s brother is killed and the novel culminates with Parham’s
attempt to claim his brother’s body and give it a proper burial. The Crossing is a melancholic
work that reflects constantly (and often at great length) on the nature of loss, the passage of
time, the fragility of truth, and the impossibility of satisfaction. It develops, in detailed
counterpoint to the bleakness of Blood Meridian’s nearly unchecked nihilism, a vision of
“witnessing” that cannot prevent life’s losses but may, in part, sanctify them.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts. New York: Vintage, 1995.
The Stonemason is a play in five acts that is set in Kentucky in the 1970s. The play involves
four generations of the Telfair family, all African American stonemasons, and focuses on
Ben Telfair. Ben is a third generation Telfair and he has dedicated his life to learning “true
masonry” from his grandfather. However, other members of the Telfair family have been
snared by greed and debt and, as a result, the family may lose everything. On this score, The
Stonemason is classic McCarthy: it centers on the pursuit of true craftsmanship but details the
obstacles that, increasingly, disconnect us from that possibility. In particular, McCarthy uses
stonemasonry as an occasion to reflect on the nature of truth, the weakness of words, and
what it means to make something of enduring value.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form. New York: Vintage, 2006.
The Sunset Limited is structured as a play with only two characters: a man named “Black”
and a man named “White.” The novel consists almost entirely of dialogue in which Black
and White argue explicitly about the nature of suffering, the meaning life, and the existence
of God. White is a “professor,” affluent and middle aged. Black is uneducated and lives in
poverty. Prior to the action of the novel, Black had rescued White from an attempted suicide.
Throughout their conversation, Black embodies a kind of practical wisdom, hard won from
life, that defends God’s reality. White, on the other hand, argues from the perspective of a
first-world nihilism that objects, with discouraging sophistication, to the positions taken by
Black. The novel distills (perhaps too neatly) two of the basic perspectives that McCarthy’s
fiction often holds in tension.
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