Religion Between the Parody of Faith and the Epiphany of Grace in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

Abstract

The metaphysical inquiry of Blood Meridian is structured in two moments, both involving a reflection on religion. On the one hand, the persistence of violence in the novel can be interpreted as the continuous denial of the Christian idea of “salvation through faith.” Faith, in this book, offers neither salvation for those who suffer nor punishment for evil, as it is immediately stated that “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing.” On the other hand, although the Christian God seemingly disappears from the phenomenal world, the search for a higher instance does not completely vanish from the novel. In fact, fleeting divine occurrences frequently appear throughout the novel in various transient epiphanies of grace. After grace vanishes, we can detect in the last chapters of Blood Meridian an abysmal melancholy—an expression of frustrated attempts to transcend human existence. Although this dark path traveled by the kid in Blood Meridian has led critics to call the book a Gnostic parable, these two possibilities of McCarthy’s metaphysical reflection seem to be closely related to Catholic motifs and ideology.