“An enormous sadness touched with rue”: The pathos of oneness in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree

Abstract

In Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, the novel's titular protagonist Cornelius Suttree resists his father's self‐righteous conviction in the Nietzschean “pathos of distance” by living among Knoxville's helpless and destitute and testing the theory that “there is nothing occurring in the streets.” Among the city's underclass, Suttree finds a commonality in human suffering and comes to the profound realization that “all souls are one and all souls lonely.” The essay demonstrates how Suttree's personal experience of dearth and deprivation and the sense of fellow feeling, pity, and outrage elicited from his perception of and concern for the frequently unjust suffering of others are instances of pathos that persuade him to reject his father's aristocratic and elitist “pathos of distance” in favor of the egalitarian and democratic “pathos of oneness.”