The Subversion Of Biblical Discourses:An Archetypal Study On Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is Cormac Mc Carthy’s fifth novel,the best western novel ever written,having marked the author’s transition from a southern gothic writer into a western novelist.It is a perverse,picaresque western novel about a group of indiscriminate killers who hunted Indians for their scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850 s under the leadership of an unforgettable and enormously dangerous character called Judge Holden.The central plot develops as the protagonist travels into the west.Both the theme of journey and the archetypes and patterns the book draws on remind readers of biblical mythologies with pilgrimage as a very crucial and recurrent subject.In addition,the characters of the novel are in allusion to the Christian scriptures.However,this postmodern novel is definitely not to be read as a religious work.What Mc Carthy presents to us in the form of a novel is in fact a new moral order that will subvert the mechanisms of moral assessments originally settled by biblical discourse and the binary mode of Christian thinking.The novel shows that those mechanisms never come into being naturally,but have been formed and designed by men.What it is attempting to depict is a universe of an indifferent nature.In this universe moral mechanisms can be rejected and the line between the good and the bad is always blurred.To examine the way Mc Carthy rejects the binary discourse of Christianity and undermines the biblical mythology of a promising world where the good is distant from the bad,the thesis paper first digs into the central plot with the approach of myth-archetypal criticism.It elaborates on the types and patterns that Mc Carthy borrows from the works of biblical contexts,including and not limited to the Bible and other literary works that follow the same religious tradition such as The Pilgrim’s Progress.Then,the paper analyzes how Mc Carthy modifies these types and patterns and makes them serve a purpose totally different from what they have originally been created for.As the character of Judge Holden comes to be more distinctive than every other character in this novel,the thesis paper attempts to disclose the judge’s resemblance to both God and Satan through close reading of the correspondent texts of biblical connotations.The nature of the judge is compared with the binary nature of the Christian God and Satan and thus the difference between them are unveiled.Mainly applying the approach of mythic-archetypal criticism,the thesis endeavors to find out how and why Mc Carthy challenges the biblical discourse and the moral assessments as well as the moral order it has established.