Understanding Cormac McCarthy

Abstract

This is a roadmap to the dark and mythic topography of McCarthy's fiction. Named by Harold Bloom as one of the most significant American novelists of our time, Cormac McCarthy has been honored with the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, and the coveted MacArthur Fellowship. Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of McCarthy's fiction, assessing with the author's aesthetic and thematic concerns, his philosophical and religious influences, and his participation in Western literary traditions. Frye explores the early works of the Tennessee period in the context of the 'romance' genre, the southern gothic and grotesque, and the carnivalesque. A chapter is devoted to Blood Meridian, a novel that marks McCarthy's transition to the West and his full recognition as a major force in American letters. In the final two chapters, Frye explores McCarthy's Border Trilogy and his later works - specifically No Country for Old Men and The Road - addressing the manner in which McCarthy's preoccupation with violence and human depravity exists alongside a perpetual search for meaning, purpose, and value.