Book Review: Blood Meridian

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Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, was written by Cormac McCarthy and it was published by the Random House in February, 1985. McCarthy was born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. McCarthy is a popular American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, all within two common genres, the Southern melodramatic and Western genre. McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee in 1951, where he majored in liberal arts. He is Anti-Western, and an extremely private person, as he has continually declined to appear in any conferences or give any speeches. Blood Meridian examines major frontier themes such as Man's affinity for violence, religion, and power in the Western American History. The novel is based on a true story, and it examines the traditions of the American Southwest. The story follows the trail of a young boy, known as "The Kid”. The Kid is the novel’s protagonist. The Kid was born into an unruly 1830s America, and his journey is one of self-preservation. The first five chapters of the novel describe the Kid’s experience from birth in an outhouse, and his running away from his home in Tennessee. He goes as far as Texas, eventually ending up in Mexico. The Kid gets imprisoned in a Chihuahua cell, but is released shortly by the leader of a clan of scalp hunters. The antagonist in the novel is Judge Holden, known as the “child-killer”. The Kid survives many hardships such as gun shots, bar fights, and fires as he blunders through the Mexican desert. He continually flees each town in hopes for a better opportunity, only to find more disarray and violence in the next. The next fourteen chapters deal with The Kid subsequently joining the Glanton Gang, and the events leading up to the tumbling apart of the Gang. The Gang comprised of Native Americans, Mexicans, Blacks, and Whites. The gang was hired by the Mexican government to kill

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