An Intertextual Study Of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian And Melville’s Moby Dick

Cormac McCarthy (1933-) is a famous American novelist and playwright, and is crowned the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His fifth work Blood Meridian breaks the traditional images of the West, truly representing the Indian massacre in the America-Mexico borderlands in the mid-19th century. Harold Bloom takes Blood Meridian as a masterpiece, which enjoys the same literary accomplishment as Merman Melville’s Moby Dick. With closer examination, these two novels share striking analogies as well as discrepancies. Therefore, based on Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality, this thesis takes an intertextual study of Blood Meridian and Moby Dick.In this assertion, Blood Meridian is compared with its intertext Moby Dick, and the inter-referential parts in structure, theme as well as characters are illustrated one by one. The first chapter analyzes the similarity and difference between Blood Meridian and Moby Dick from structural point of view, examining McCarthy’s writing transcendence under the influence of the era background. The second chapter makes a research on themes-violence and the relationship between man and nature, exploring how McCarthy takes topics from Melville’s Moby Dick and then gives Blood Meridian a more profound connotation of the time and history. The third chapter discusses the characters in both novels to illustrate that McCarthy has portrayed "kid" and Judge Holden after Ishmael and Ahab from Moby Dick. At the same time, combined with American history and special time background (Vietnam War), McCarthy gives a new dimension to the protagonists in his novel.Finally, we can safely conclude that Melville’s Moby Dick has a far-reaching impact on McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. However, Blood Meridian is, by no means, a pure imitation of the pretext. McCarthy closely relates his work with the West Expansion and Vietnam War. In this respect, he demythologizes the heroic and glorious West, reveling the dark nature of the Wild West. And at the same time, McCarthy also demonstrates the profound influence of the spirit of Manifest Destiny, which is now still exploited by the political ideology of America. With Blood Meridian, McCarthy expresses his condemnation of imperialist ideology, and hopes to warn Americans from being deceived by state ideology, which is of great realistic values.