A string in the maze: The mythos of Cormac McCarthy

The idea that Cormac McCarthy's novels are "as innocent of theme and of ethical reference as they are of plot" has dominated critical discussion, prompting many to read him as a post-modern author whose "impenetrable" enigmas cannot be decoded.;Parting with such interpretations, this study applies close reading and thematic analysis to show that despite dense obscurities designed to replicate a darksome world, McCarthy's work in fact consistently sets forth a single well defined mythos.;As spiritual seekers eager to know their own place in the world, McCarthy's characters perform unwitting reenactments of the life of Christ or replicate the crime of Judas: The quest to redeem captive creatures from bondage, and the taboo act of bounty-hunting, dominate the works.;The hero's quest proves problematic, however: He confronts a cosmos that "don't agree with the bible." His mission of deliverance is generally thwarted. He finds that his will and his destiny merge only in acts of destruction. The god he meets in his allegorical travels, or glimpses in visions and dreams, is an atavistic monster prone to violence, or an abject artisan who is himself enslaved to fate.;Many of the novels feature paired protagonists, often siblings or surrogate brothers, one of whom is ardentheartedly committed to his Christ-like cause (and dies a martyr's death), while his more ambivalent sibling survives to wander the world in continued perplexity, always in danger of reaching the Slough of Despond.;Thus pairing Everyman as archetypal hero with Everyman as baffled ambivalent seeker, McCarthy's novels are structured to answer the large philosophical questions that trouble his protagonists, and so serve as "the astrolabe or sextant" by which the reader might fix his own place in the cosmos McCarthy envisions.;Aiming at metaphysical insight and spiritual solace, the novels thus update and redefine the long tradition in art, literature, and philosophy that sums up the human condition by invoking Christ as its archetype with the Biblical phrase Ecce homo, "Behold the man," (McCarthy's recurring "See him!"), or its alternate, Ecce, puer---Blood Meridian's opening line: "See the child.";Readings of McCarthy's first eight novels penetrate the ambiguities to find coherence in the narrator's vatic pronouncements; the protagonists's visions; the predictions of heretics and blind seers; the tales-within-the-tale that serve as parables; and the mirrored episodes that typically structure the plot.