Abstract
Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree is a literary representation of existentialism. The eponymous protagonist seeks his meaning and purpose in a universe that offers none. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism proposes that people must fill the blank slate of the self and establish their own values through their actions. However, instead of establishing his values according to his constantly becoming self, Suttree restrictively bases his values on his material, monetary, functional and social existence. Sartre’s theory of bad faith provides a means to understand Suttree’s identity conflict and argues that the individual should identify not with any particular state of being, but rather with the constant process of becoming. Bad faith is a mode of self-deception in which one believes he is something he is not, or believes he is not something that he is. Suttree’s many forms of bad faith—material, monetary, functional, and social—hinder his ability to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life and embrace his responsibility to create himself. Of all the forms of bad faith Suttree suffers, perhaps the most detrimental to his project of self-creation is his failure to let go of the past. His obsession with past failures and deaths impedes his progress to a new, productive self. By transcending his oppressive past and realizing that he is a combination of his constituent parts and never solely one of them, Suttree understands his responsibility to embrace his past and propel himself into new identities in the constant quest of becoming. Suttree exemplifies a responsible embrace of the project of self-creation in the midst of materialism and nihilism.
Highlights
Cormac McCarthy’s novels abound in philosophical wonder at life’s mysteries
Suttree exemplifies a responsible embrace of the project of self-creation in the midst of materialism and nihilism
They’re just dead” (McCarthy [1996] 2015, p. 94); and take Suttree, the eponymous protagonist, who surveys the entirety of his life and probes every detail for the speck of meaning each moment contains
Summary
Cormac McCarthy’s novels abound in philosophical wonder at life’s mysteries. His characters wrestle with ancient questions about reality, life’s meaning, human fate, morality, and identity, all while drafting answers both classic and innovative. One must affirm one’s life and assert one’s freedom by filling the blank slate of oneself through every action He maintains that “existence precedes essence,” by which he means that one exists as a living human being without values or certainties and only by acting does one acquire values and knowledge. The human condition Sartre and Albert Camus describe—that of despair, meaninglessness, nothingness, near-annihilating freedom, and grave responsibility—is in blaring alignment with the human condition McCarthy’s fiction captures. His novels demonstrate that existentialism is not a theory, but a reality, one which urges for responsible self-creation and lucid awareness of oneself and the world in which one lives. McCarthy, with his careful depiction of a life in need of repair, achieves a disclosure of human despair and inspires within the reader a longing for self-reconstruction for the character and all of humankind
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