An Outcast in an Alien Land: The Metaphor of Dogs in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing

Abstract

Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing chronicles three border-crossing journeys of the 16-year-old protagonist Billy Parham, in each of which there appear some sporadic descriptions of animals, namely, wolves and dogs. As the shewolf in the first part of the novel is so vividly described with copious details that it has naturally attracted monographic studies of critics. In his “Wolves as Metaphors in The Crossing”, an article anthologized in Animals in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy, Wallis R. Sanborn holds that “while McCarthy honors and promotes the mythos of the wolf in The Crossing, he also demonstrates man’s urge to control the natural world in a series of human-driven indignities the she-wolf is forced to undergo” (Sanborn 143). In his “Narrative Disruption As Animal Agency in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing”, Raymond Malewitz argues that the she-wolf has “undecidability” as it is “both held and not held, terrible and beautiful, immobile flower and swift huntress” (Malewitz 558). In comparison to the she-wolf, the nocturnal stray dog, the home dog and the yellow dog, which respectively appear in Billy’s three journeys and obviously function as narrative metaphors than other dog-scene descriptions, have not been fully studied than they deserve. They have only won sporadic comments by critics when interpreting other features of the novel. For instance, when studying the gothic vision of atomic bomb that the novel may insinuate, Robert H. Brinkmeyer associates the yellow dog at the end of the novel to the result of the “atomic bomb’s terrifying power to disfigure and destroy” (Brinkmeyer 179). Similarly, in explicating the “genre and the geographies of violence” of McCarthy’s fiction as well as the other contemporary Western fiction, Susan Kollin mentions that “the miserable animal finds his counterpart in the equally distraught cowboy” (Kollin 582). Kollin’s idea finds its echo in Kevin L Cole (2000), Isabel Soto (2002), Edwin T. Arnold (2001) and other critics. So far, it seems that all these smattering comments only focus on the yellow dog that appears in the end of the novel, ignoring the metaphorical https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1928593