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Whales and Men
- GenresAmericanNonfictionDrama
133 pages, Unbound
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About the author
Cormac McCarthy
49 books28.8k followersCormac McCarthy was a highly acclaimed American novelist and screenwriter celebrated for his distinctive literary style, philosophical depth, and exploration of violence, morality, and the human condition. His writing, often characterized by sparse punctuation and lyrical, biblical language, delved into the primal forces that shape human behavior, set against the haunting landscapes of the American South and Southwest.
McCarthy’s early novels, including The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, established him as a powerful voice in Southern Gothic literature, while Blood Meridian (1985) is frequently cited as his magnum opus—a brutal, visionary epic about violence and manifest destiny in the American West. In the 1990s, his "Border Trilogy"—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—garnered widespread popularity and critical acclaim, blending coming-of-age themes with philosophical introspection and tragic realism.
His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by the Coen brothers, and his harrowing post-apocalyptic tale The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also made into a major motion picture. Both works brought him mainstream recognition and a broader readership later in his career.
Despite his fame, McCarthy remained famously private and rarely gave interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself. His legacy endures through his powerful, often unsettling portrayals of humanity’s struggle with fate, violence, and redemption, making him one of the most influential and original voices in modern American literature.
McCarthy’s early novels, including The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, established him as a powerful voice in Southern Gothic literature, while Blood Meridian (1985) is frequently cited as his magnum opus—a brutal, visionary epic about violence and manifest destiny in the American West. In the 1990s, his "Border Trilogy"—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—garnered widespread popularity and critical acclaim, blending coming-of-age themes with philosophical introspection and tragic realism.
His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by the Coen brothers, and his harrowing post-apocalyptic tale The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also made into a major motion picture. Both works brought him mainstream recognition and a broader readership later in his career.
Despite his fame, McCarthy remained famously private and rarely gave interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself. His legacy endures through his powerful, often unsettling portrayals of humanity’s struggle with fate, violence, and redemption, making him one of the most influential and original voices in modern American literature.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
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September 4, 2015This was much better than I was led to believe. Strangely light for McCarthy, playful but still serious. Full of beautiful ideas and passages, which I intend to sit down to mine out one of these afternoons. It was mere chance that I read it so soon after Plato's Republic, but it was, as Bob Ross always sez, a happy accident. Read it like a Platonic dialogue instead of a screenplay. The influence is obvious enough.
A minor work, but at least as good as The Counselor. In fact, I prefer Whales and Men to that late work and wish it were more widely available. Perhaps a better and less rushed review at some later date.
A minor work, but at least as good as The Counselor. In fact, I prefer Whales and Men to that late work and wish it were more widely available. Perhaps a better and less rushed review at some later date.
August 27, 2017
McCarthy is a true great.
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October 15, 2022In Stacey Peebles,Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen she writes:
"In 1986 McCarthy traveled to Argentina with his friend Roger Payne, a whale biologist. Payne had become publically known in the 1970s when his recording Songs of the Humpback Whale was instrumental in bring- ing attention to the whale and to its complex vocalizations. When Payne pub- lished his book Among Whales in 1995, he dedicated it to his wife and to Cormac McCarthy, noting in the acknowledgements that McCarthy had read and commented on the manuscript as well as discussed it with him in depth. “In my experience,” he went on, “there is no precedent for someone not a professional biologist being so well-read and so clearly informed about biology”. As Edwin Arnold has noted, parts of Payne’s book and McCarthy’s screenplay seem like sibling texts, especially as Payne urges creative people to build the beauty of whales into their art."
It’s almost impossible to imagine the “Of Whales and Men” script being produced, especially in the pre-CGI 1980s, with its whale-wrangling and whale-hunting requirements (cf. John Huston’s memoir and Ray Bradbury’s thinly veiled novel about the production of Huston’s Moby-Dick, Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel of Ray Bradbury's Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland), the characters’ pages-long philosophical speechifying, and extensive locations including a Florida yacht club, Irish baronial manors, a port in Colombo Shri Lanka, the coast of Djibouti, a jungle war zone, and the House of Lords. In form it’s closer to one of Plato’s dialogues than screenplay or a Novel in Dramatic Form.
The screenplay is an entertaining read and contains some of McCarthy’s finest writing and food for thought. It seems to have been salvaged and parts used in the assembling of The Passenger (a protagonist named Western and Mozart’s 2nd Violin Concerto on the tape deck, to name two from the first few paragraphs of the excerpt in today’s NY Times.) He seems to have reimagined the baby whale euthanasia scene as Billy Parham’s experience with the pregnant she-wolf in The Crossing. Some of the character’s theories on language and the unconscious made their way into his essay “The Kekulé Problem.”
"In 1986 McCarthy traveled to Argentina with his friend Roger Payne, a whale biologist. Payne had become publically known in the 1970s when his recording Songs of the Humpback Whale was instrumental in bring- ing attention to the whale and to its complex vocalizations. When Payne pub- lished his book Among Whales in 1995, he dedicated it to his wife and to Cormac McCarthy, noting in the acknowledgements that McCarthy had read and commented on the manuscript as well as discussed it with him in depth. “In my experience,” he went on, “there is no precedent for someone not a professional biologist being so well-read and so clearly informed about biology”. As Edwin Arnold has noted, parts of Payne’s book and McCarthy’s screenplay seem like sibling texts, especially as Payne urges creative people to build the beauty of whales into their art."
It’s almost impossible to imagine the “Of Whales and Men” script being produced, especially in the pre-CGI 1980s, with its whale-wrangling and whale-hunting requirements (cf. John Huston’s memoir and Ray Bradbury’s thinly veiled novel about the production of Huston’s Moby-Dick, Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel of Ray Bradbury's Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland), the characters’ pages-long philosophical speechifying, and extensive locations including a Florida yacht club, Irish baronial manors, a port in Colombo Shri Lanka, the coast of Djibouti, a jungle war zone, and the House of Lords. In form it’s closer to one of Plato’s dialogues than screenplay or a Novel in Dramatic Form.
The screenplay is an entertaining read and contains some of McCarthy’s finest writing and food for thought. It seems to have been salvaged and parts used in the assembling of The Passenger (a protagonist named Western and Mozart’s 2nd Violin Concerto on the tape deck, to name two from the first few paragraphs of the excerpt in today’s NY Times.) He seems to have reimagined the baby whale euthanasia scene as Billy Parham’s experience with the pregnant she-wolf in The Crossing. Some of the character’s theories on language and the unconscious made their way into his essay “The Kekulé Problem.”
June 26, 2024
All the hallmarks, you might say. Philosophical insight, good and evil, the folly of man and his god, the natural world taking precedence overall, and even a couple sentences in spanish.
You really get the sense for how McCarthy was developing his ideas and working out ways to present them through dialogue and story.
Especially quirky was the method of having the characters talk about each other, and not to each other.
A true gem and must read for any McCarthy fan. Understandable that it was never published, but I am very grateful to have been able to read it on printed page.
“Maybe hope springs eternal in the whale's heart too. I don’t know. If you look at the history of species there seems to be no selective advantage to intelligence. It's the microbes who have totally ignored selection for three and a half billion years that remain with us and probably will remain. They seem almost immortal.“
“Whales have been evolving for thirty million years. To our one million. A sperm whale’s brain is seven times the size of mine… The great size of his body has little to do with the great size of his brain, other than as a place to keep it. I have What If fantasies… What if the catalyst or the key to understanding creation lay somewhere in the immense mind of the whale? … Some species go for months without eating anything. Just completely idle.. So they have this incredible mental apparatus and no one has the least notion what they do with it. Lilly says that the most logical supposition, based on physiological and ecological evidence, is that they contemplate the universe… Suppose God came back from wherever it is he’s been and asked us smilingly if we’d figure it out yet. Suppose he wanted to know if it had finally occurred to us to ask the whale. And then he sort of looked around and he said, “By the way, where are the whales?”
“People seldom know what it is that’s eating them. They don’t know what they after. What is it that Hoffer says? You can never get enough of what you don’t really want?”
“I believe that the reason there are millions of planets is the same reason that there are millions of eggs.
To allow for failure. There must be countless experimental stations like this one. The only thing that is not expendable is the experiment itself.”
“Actually I find old photographs a bit unsettling. They do seem to accuse somehow.
They're not like paintings. They're a
more successful illusion. There are photos here of my great great grandparents going back a hundred and thirty years.
They were taken in front of the house
and in the photographs the house is exactly the same.
It has not changed at all. Well, I think you get my point.
I find it... The fact that we are. seguential
beings in a sense. (Be opens the album.) That their most enduring reality - and mine - should
take the form
of a small square of tin or cardboard. Like a form of taxidermy, really. I just find it... It's not sad.
It's just
unnatural
in some way.”
“Do you hate people?
“No. You know that's not true.”
“But you dont think they're fit to reproduce.”
“I saw where the sort of commitment I contemplated could take me. That there could come a point somewhere where I would have to choose. Between whales and men. That I could be called upon to take sides in some irrevocable way and that ultimately it could mean taking human life. And I knew that if I did I was lost.”
“Some years later I was in Europe and a
friend of mine and I went out to Dachau one Sunday morning. It was in November and it was cold and there werent many tourists. There was something about the place that was familiar and I tried to place what it was. And it was the abandoned whaling station. You could see the care that had gone into it. The care.
Human consideration had laid out those compounds.
Decided where the messhall should be. The baths, the guardstations.
The furnaces. It was a cold windy day
and it was very lonely. Someone told me that the local dogs wouldnt go near there. What I thought about most was the fear that had been there. Just the enormity of it. It's so terrible.
I was always that way. • I can
see hunger or illness... But a frightened child.
(Shaking his head) I just... I kept thinking: What if beings from another planet should see this? What would they say? What would we say? What could we say?
What could we possibly say? I looked at that place and I had a thousand thoughts. I tried to think of something worse than man and I couldnt.”
“What if the reason we no longer believe in God has nothing to do with science? What if it's just that we can no longer bear to have him see us?“
“Anyway in the whale
either side and you can see the fingers and thumb and the little nostrils and ears and at one point it looks alarmingly like a human fetus. And one day I was at the Oceanographic Institute and that's what I saw.
Curled up in a glass vial. A blue whale fetus.
Holding out its little hands like so.
I had an uncanny
sense that we were somehow included in the whale's history. That we were what the whale might have been.
And that he was what we would never be.”
“She wants to put her arms around it and comfort it and it's the size of a truck.
Just the fact that it is so huge. To be orphaned.
It's like a stranded alien. You're right. There's not a bloody thing to be done. That's just it.
This vast helplessness.
This absolute waste of compassion.
It's not that the universe has no ears to hear the cries of the wietched rising night and day out of this bottomless pit of misery. It's not that.
It's that it’s all wrong. An intelligent child
of six could have designed a painless universe.”
You really get the sense for how McCarthy was developing his ideas and working out ways to present them through dialogue and story.
Especially quirky was the method of having the characters talk about each other, and not to each other.
A true gem and must read for any McCarthy fan. Understandable that it was never published, but I am very grateful to have been able to read it on printed page.
“Maybe hope springs eternal in the whale's heart too. I don’t know. If you look at the history of species there seems to be no selective advantage to intelligence. It's the microbes who have totally ignored selection for three and a half billion years that remain with us and probably will remain. They seem almost immortal.“
“Whales have been evolving for thirty million years. To our one million. A sperm whale’s brain is seven times the size of mine… The great size of his body has little to do with the great size of his brain, other than as a place to keep it. I have What If fantasies… What if the catalyst or the key to understanding creation lay somewhere in the immense mind of the whale? … Some species go for months without eating anything. Just completely idle.. So they have this incredible mental apparatus and no one has the least notion what they do with it. Lilly says that the most logical supposition, based on physiological and ecological evidence, is that they contemplate the universe… Suppose God came back from wherever it is he’s been and asked us smilingly if we’d figure it out yet. Suppose he wanted to know if it had finally occurred to us to ask the whale. And then he sort of looked around and he said, “By the way, where are the whales?”
“People seldom know what it is that’s eating them. They don’t know what they after. What is it that Hoffer says? You can never get enough of what you don’t really want?”
“I believe that the reason there are millions of planets is the same reason that there are millions of eggs.
To allow for failure. There must be countless experimental stations like this one. The only thing that is not expendable is the experiment itself.”
“Actually I find old photographs a bit unsettling. They do seem to accuse somehow.
They're not like paintings. They're a
more successful illusion. There are photos here of my great great grandparents going back a hundred and thirty years.
They were taken in front of the house
and in the photographs the house is exactly the same.
It has not changed at all. Well, I think you get my point.
I find it... The fact that we are. seguential
beings in a sense. (Be opens the album.) That their most enduring reality - and mine - should
take the form
of a small square of tin or cardboard. Like a form of taxidermy, really. I just find it... It's not sad.
It's just
unnatural
in some way.”
“Do you hate people?
“No. You know that's not true.”
“But you dont think they're fit to reproduce.”
“I saw where the sort of commitment I contemplated could take me. That there could come a point somewhere where I would have to choose. Between whales and men. That I could be called upon to take sides in some irrevocable way and that ultimately it could mean taking human life. And I knew that if I did I was lost.”
“Some years later I was in Europe and a
friend of mine and I went out to Dachau one Sunday morning. It was in November and it was cold and there werent many tourists. There was something about the place that was familiar and I tried to place what it was. And it was the abandoned whaling station. You could see the care that had gone into it. The care.
Human consideration had laid out those compounds.
Decided where the messhall should be. The baths, the guardstations.
The furnaces. It was a cold windy day
and it was very lonely. Someone told me that the local dogs wouldnt go near there. What I thought about most was the fear that had been there. Just the enormity of it. It's so terrible.
I was always that way. • I can
see hunger or illness... But a frightened child.
(Shaking his head) I just... I kept thinking: What if beings from another planet should see this? What would they say? What would we say? What could we say?
What could we possibly say? I looked at that place and I had a thousand thoughts. I tried to think of something worse than man and I couldnt.”
“What if the reason we no longer believe in God has nothing to do with science? What if it's just that we can no longer bear to have him see us?“
“Anyway in the whale
either side and you can see the fingers and thumb and the little nostrils and ears and at one point it looks alarmingly like a human fetus. And one day I was at the Oceanographic Institute and that's what I saw.
Curled up in a glass vial. A blue whale fetus.
Holding out its little hands like so.
I had an uncanny
sense that we were somehow included in the whale's history. That we were what the whale might have been.
And that he was what we would never be.”
“She wants to put her arms around it and comfort it and it's the size of a truck.
Just the fact that it is so huge. To be orphaned.
It's like a stranded alien. You're right. There's not a bloody thing to be done. That's just it.
This vast helplessness.
This absolute waste of compassion.
It's not that the universe has no ears to hear the cries of the wietched rising night and day out of this bottomless pit of misery. It's not that.
It's that it’s all wrong. An intelligent child
of six could have designed a painless universe.”
December 21, 2023
I was shocked to find out this was written in the 80's because a lot of the themes in Whales and Men seemed to become a big focus in McCarthy's (much) later works. I'm talking about the Kekulé Problem (pause here and go read that. I'm incredibly serious, stop this review now, go read the Kekulé Problem, come back), the Passenger, and Stella Maris. The theme I'm referring to being language, it's evolution, and the impact of language on human epistemology and perception. Like, the 2022 duology's assertion that mental disorders (schizophrenia, in this case) do not exist in the animal kingdom because language does not exist in the animal kingdom.
Here, in Whales and Men, evil is a human condition that has arisen from the convention of naming, of speaking, assigning symbols, confusing the symbol for the real thing. "A thing named becomes the named thing." Whales have a pretty sophisticated system of communications but exist outside the parameters assigned, in this hypothesis, to humans, this being a result of the massive distance whales can communicate over, a vacuum chamber the size of the pacific ocean in which words (noises) evolve simultaneously, communication is one to one, symbols have a universally definite meaning.
The human condition is a series of wires twisted and meanings mislaid. "... civil wars are the bloodiest and that most murder victims are killed by members of their own household. But it isn't pure proximity that triggers rage. It's Betrayal. It's not communication but the shattered illusion of it that sets us at each others throats. What we are driven mad by is our own lies. We long for communion but we have no real belief in it."
Whales and Men gives a lot to think over but its also just a really moving piece of writing. The rising action is crafted perfectly to make the climax hit like a freight train. 133 pages, this is a one-sitter, do read. Just make sure to read the Kekulé Problem either right before or directly after,
Here, in Whales and Men, evil is a human condition that has arisen from the convention of naming, of speaking, assigning symbols, confusing the symbol for the real thing. "A thing named becomes the named thing." Whales have a pretty sophisticated system of communications but exist outside the parameters assigned, in this hypothesis, to humans, this being a result of the massive distance whales can communicate over, a vacuum chamber the size of the pacific ocean in which words (noises) evolve simultaneously, communication is one to one, symbols have a universally definite meaning.
The human condition is a series of wires twisted and meanings mislaid. "... civil wars are the bloodiest and that most murder victims are killed by members of their own household. But it isn't pure proximity that triggers rage. It's Betrayal. It's not communication but the shattered illusion of it that sets us at each others throats. What we are driven mad by is our own lies. We long for communion but we have no real belief in it."
Whales and Men gives a lot to think over but its also just a really moving piece of writing. The rising action is crafted perfectly to make the climax hit like a freight train. 133 pages, this is a one-sitter, do read. Just make sure to read the Kekulé Problem either right before or directly after,
July 30, 2024
Hidden away in this unpublished screenplay are McCarthy's deepest meditations on evil, creation, God, science, love, human existence, and, simply, existence. These are questions that have always vexed him, though they're explored in a much more intimate and personal story. Terribly sad. Philosophically dense. And brilliant.
I might be crazy, but I think this could've been a third McCarty masterpiece had he turned it into a novel, re-worked parts of it, and expanded other parts. Can you imagine McCarthy's flowing and sparse prose painting the shades of night's blackness over the sea?
"Yet I cannot believe that whales and men are alien beings. I believe we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing. I know that we are lost but I no longer believe that we are doomed." (130)
I might be crazy, but I think this could've been a third McCarty masterpiece had he turned it into a novel, re-worked parts of it, and expanded other parts. Can you imagine McCarthy's flowing and sparse prose painting the shades of night's blackness over the sea?
"Yet I cannot believe that whales and men are alien beings. I believe we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing. I know that we are lost but I no longer believe that we are doomed." (130)
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October 23, 2024A few weeks ago I saw a beautiful picture of a whale's eye, up close. It stunned me and took me aback, this image, like it might've when I was very young. A rare thing in an age where we've been numbed to the fact that we can see billions of pictures of anything at all at a moment's notice.
A few days after I saw that picture I read that its subject had been struck by a speeding boat. Her lower jaw was ripped off and she spent three hours in (I imagine) complete agony before dying. I watched the video. Then I decided it was time to read this.
More cerebral and less violent, in a sense, than his other works, I'm amazed McCarthy never saw fit to publish this. I wish he had.
A few days after I saw that picture I read that its subject had been struck by a speeding boat. Her lower jaw was ripped off and she spent three hours in (I imagine) complete agony before dying. I watched the video. Then I decided it was time to read this.
More cerebral and less violent, in a sense, than his other works, I'm amazed McCarthy never saw fit to publish this. I wish he had.
September 3, 2023
McCarthy’s Whales and Men seems to be McCarthy at his best. His philosophizing on evil’s provenance, the enormity of the whale as a being, the relationship between language and the unconscious— there is not a single letter that goes wasted.
“Pain is the one god before whom we bow without question or reservation.”
“But there’s nothing ambiguous about cruelty. Dachau has no second meaning. It can never be anything but what it is. And even the dogs understand it.”
What is it that drives humanity to attach grenades to the head of a harpoon and destroy the whale? Are humans both the source and agents of evil? Is it the whales “state of immediacy” that we feel inadequate to? Does language deprive us of a truer understanding of our planet and the universe? McCarthy seems to delve into the depths of the human soul here and does it with a beauty unmatched in all of literature.
“Pain is the one god before whom we bow without question or reservation.”
“But there’s nothing ambiguous about cruelty. Dachau has no second meaning. It can never be anything but what it is. And even the dogs understand it.”
What is it that drives humanity to attach grenades to the head of a harpoon and destroy the whale? Are humans both the source and agents of evil? Is it the whales “state of immediacy” that we feel inadequate to? Does language deprive us of a truer understanding of our planet and the universe? McCarthy seems to delve into the depths of the human soul here and does it with a beauty unmatched in all of literature.
December 28, 2023
I didn’t know what I was expecting from this work: I didn’t know it was contemporary for the time written or that it would be full of love for whales and philosophizing. So much of this work is thoughtful and emotional. It truly feels like McCarthy at his most unedited, replete with wonder and naïveté from the characters—and this is beautiful. This is such a wonderful piece as it is, though it would be great to see a film of it one day—and if it had been further worked on and became a novel, it would be incredible. Maybe this will be officially published posthumously…
July 10, 2023
First boring thing I've read by McCarthy... personally I think it's because one of the main characters is old money wealthy, and many pages are spent describing the trappings, behavior and carelessness of the uber rich. Didn't finish it and this def won't ever be performed I don't think...
June 9, 2023
Another masterpiece by McCarthy. I wonder why he never finished this screenplay. Perhaps because it would be a boring movie, but it was definitely an amazing read.
May 17, 2024
Even though this would probably not be a very good movie by conventional standards, I wish someone would just produce it anyway like Ridley Scott did with McCarthy’s ‘The Counselor.’
There was a meme on Twitter about how both Melville in Moby Dick and God in the Book of Job respond to existential despair with digressions about whales. McCarthy one-ups them by inspiring existential despair *with* digressions about whales.
Read this in two sittings, only because my wife suggested I not stay up all night on a Monday to finish it in one. I am going to be thinking about the rambling monologues he put in the mouths of these eccentric characters for a long time to come.
There was a meme on Twitter about how both Melville in Moby Dick and God in the Book of Job respond to existential despair with digressions about whales. McCarthy one-ups them by inspiring existential despair *with* digressions about whales.
Read this in two sittings, only because my wife suggested I not stay up all night on a Monday to finish it in one. I am going to be thinking about the rambling monologues he put in the mouths of these eccentric characters for a long time to come.
October 13, 2025
He'll make a worthwhile point about human practice such as how we name something and thereafter feel content that we know it and foolishly toss the named object away, but he'll go on to associate something like this with stuff more metaphysical in kind and it all sounds over the top and far-fetched to me. Just common words like Justice Evil Love tossed together in a bland smoothie. Not much insight at all. Frankly I like MCcarthy when he strings good paragraphs together that sound like poetry, which is why Suttree is his best, but not so much when he's cobbling together monologues for characters who dont speak like real people.
October 30, 2023
Socratic dialogues in a medium that rests in some liminal space. This is no screenplay nor theatre play. The blueprint for his late career masterpiece.
November 10, 2024
(4.5) Going out to sit under the stars and smoke my pipe. Read this. One day someone will find the right images and sounds to go with the words. But for now, silence.
April 13, 2025
stunning and profound. thought provoking. touches on the most bare elements of life itself
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews