A New Historicist Study Of Violence In Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian describes a band of mercenaries and scalphunters and their expeditions on the Mexican-American borderlands.The novel is known for its unsettling and graphic violence.Thus the theme of violence in Blood Meridian continues to pose a formidable challenge to critics.Equipped with real historical figures and events,Blood Meridian’s senseless violence seems to move against the American official history and the American national myth of the West.This thesis draws from Louis Montrose’s theory of New Historicism and Richard Slokin’s theory of the mythology of American West to explore how Blood Meridian’s alternative construction of history critiques the myth of the West and necessitates a new model of reading history.Blood Meridian is deeply concerned with the relationship between violence and history.By fusing historical facts and fiction,McCarthy represents the endless violence on the frontier as well as the representational violence that accompanies it.This thesis analyzes how the framing of American western frontier shapes the West as a place that is susceptible to both physical and representational violence,which asserts the inevitable violence and the nature of history as a constructed narrative.This thesis shows McCarthy’s moral ambiguity of historical violence and his historical skepticism.