Zack Demko
Hour 1
Blood Meridian and the Nature of Violence
Cormac McCarthy has what one would consider an unusual obsession with
violence. This obsession is very prevalent in his critically acclaimed, Blood Meridian.
The novel initially revolves around a young man, “The Kid”, and his roaming lifestyle in
Texas. Eventually, The Kid winds up in a gang of lawless and immoral scalp hunters, and
this is when McCarthy breaks into his element of the crude and the grotesque. However,
McCarthy’s use of violence is not written without purpose. The author uses the many
obscene events of Blood Meridian to ask his audience if war and violence are part of
humanity’s nature, or if they are just excuses for the hateful.
Topic Sentence: McCarthy’s character, Judge Holden, acts as more of an idea than an
actual human being; McCarthy describes him as if he is war itself, and he provides the
reader with the belief that violence in humans is natural and inevitable.
 “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade
awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
 “Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”
 “War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of
existence. War is god.”
Topic Sentence: The Kid’s struggle to adapt to the lifestyle of the rest of the gang and
his inability to commit the same atrocities suggest that not everyone was born with a
natural instinct for violence.
 “In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that
cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be.”
 “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done
so by now?”
 “Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all
question of right.”
Holden’s convincing rants on the nature of man, and war’s place in it, continue
throughout the pages of McCarthy’s work, as well as The Kid’s reluctance to convert to
his teachings. The two beliefs play a sort of tug of war with the audience’s mind. It is not
until the ending of the story that McCarthy reveals which one of the two prevails as being
the correct belief. After the gang gets split up during a horrendous battle scene, a battle in
which the entire gang, save Holden and The Kid, die, Holden seeks out The Kid to kill
him. This is his goal because this is the goal of violence, to purposelessly kill. Holden
does find The Kid, and he does kill him. This moment of the novel is a clear statement by
McCarthy. War will remain in existence as long as humanity does itself.