Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West discussion

What did y'all think of the ending. That is, assuming The Man (formerly The Kid) was killed by Judge Holden, then Holden dances among everybody and says he will never die.

I felt somewhat let down. Why bring the kid from a crummy home life to surviving the gang and Holden's wickedness to reaching adulthood and standing up to Holden, only to kill him off and let Holden kind of win. And who is Holden. Or what is Holden? Meaning: Who or what will never die?

Did The Man (formerly The Kid) really deserve that? Was he just as bad the rest of the gang and had it coming?

If McCarthy just wanted to show that corruption, wickedness, evil, and carnage never die, then I thought it was kind of a weak ending. It was shocking, yes, but a little too cryptic, and I feel like I missed something.

Thoughts????

Chris wrote: "Did The Man (formerly The Kid) really deserve that? Was he just as bad the rest of the gang and had it coming?"

I was thinking today about him killing a boy shortly before the ending, but it probably doesn't make a difference, the west doesn't care about deserving, good or bad something brutal will get you eventually.

Chris wrote: "What did y'all think of the ending. That is, assuming The Man (formerly The Kid) was killed by Judge Holden, then Holden dances among everybody and says he will never die.

I felt somewhat let dow..."

It wasn't that Holden killed him, he sodomized him in front of everybody. The dance was "sex" he let him live but took his "Manhood" away. He was teaching a lesson in my opinion, or equaling anything out. He was just dominating the land and all before him in the worst way THEY can imagine. He was everyones worse fear that they didn't want to confront but would have no problem leading them

Why would they respond in horror to the scene inside the jakes if it was just the naked kid?

-----------------------------------------------------
"He went down the walkboard toward the jakes. He stood out­side listening to the voices fading away and he looked again at the silent tracks of the stars where they died over the darkened hills. Then he opened the rough board door of the jakes and stepped in.

The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his im­mense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home be­hind him.

In the saloon two men who wanted to buy the hide were look­ing for the owner of the bear. The bear lay on the stage in an immense pool of blood. All the candles had gone out save one and it guttered uneasily in its grease like a votive lamp. In the dancehall a young man had joined the fiddler and he kept the measure of the music with a pair of spoons which he clapped between his knees. The whores sashayed half naked, some with their breasts exposed. In the mudded dogyard behind the premises two men went down the boards toward the jakes. A third man was standing there urinating into the mud.

Is someone in there? the first man said.

The man who was relieving himself did not look up. I wouldnt go in there if I was you, he said.

Is there somebody in there?

I wouldnt go in.

He hitched himself up and buttoned his trousers and stepped past them and went up the walk toward the lights. The first man watched him go and then opened the door of the jakes.

Good God almighty, he said.

What is it?

He didnt answer. He stepped past the other and went back up the walk. The other man stood looking after him. Then he opened the door and looked in."

Mark wrote: "Why would they respond in horror to the scene inside the jakes if it was just the naked kid?

-----------------------------------------------------
"He went down the walkboard toward the jakes. He ..."

My only question is this. Who is THIS man (He):

He hitched himself up and buttoned his trousers and stepped past them and went up the walk toward the lights. The first man watched him go and then opened the door of the jakes.

Is that the Judge, the kid/man, or the guy urinating in the mud who stepped past?

In my opinion, it's not a well written scene. It's too confusing, and McCarthy should have differentiated it a little better. I almost feels rushed.

If it was the kid who walks out of the jakes, I might be inclined to think that the judge did something to him, since he's buttoning his trousers. But you really can't tell. It's too ambiguous. And maybe Cormac deliberately wrote it that way.

I personally don't think the kid would let the judge do that to him since he's much older and pretty much fearless toward the judge. He's not a kid anymore.

Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think it's the judge considering he was ass-naked in the first place.
Good comment

I always though "the man" walking to the Jakes, was the kid. Even though the book refers to the kid as "kid".

The Judge is referred to my many titles and Holden, but not the "man" as far as I can recall.

In the first chapter there is telling clue: "All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man."

At the end of the book, the kid has grown up but has he matured? Has he arrived at manhood in more than the mere biological sense? Is the manishnes of that last description a mere fact?

I do not know, but I read it as the kid, entering the Jakes, where the Judge was waiting to kill him. Stab him perhaps. Metaphor in driving the latch home. closing of coffin.

Anyway, thanks for discussing it. It is a bit arcane.

Mark wrote: "I always though "the man" walking to the Jakes, was the kid. Even though the book refers to the kid as "kid".

The Judge is referred to my many titles and Holden, but not the "man" as far as I can ..."

Closing of the coffin. That's excellent. I found it kind of bittersweet in that the kid never really got affection or love, and yet, the judge kind of does that when he brings him into his arms. Yet, it's also the end for the kid too.

One of notices, that also ties back to the beginning of the story, is right around that last scene, the stars are falling. It reminded of the first page when the father tells that the stars fell when the kid was born. Kind of comes full circle I guess.

Alright, so I'm a huge fan of the ending. I think it's masterfully done, and now that I've read it more times than I can bother to count, and really feel like I have somewhat of a handle on it (though I wouldn't say I understand 100% of it), I'm amazed and appalled at how *horrible* it is. It's just creepy, and depressing, and honestly, demoralizing.

So I think I have a rather interesting take on the ending. It's certainly not one I've seen anywhere else before. And I don't really expect everyone to buy it, because I imagine that most of you have your own opinions on it. But I'd really like to get some feedback, in case someone can poke a massive hole in it or make it even better. Anyway, here goes:

Essentially, I think the final chapter, chapter 23, of Blood Meridian displays the man after his full moral disintegration and the end he comes to consequently. This will probably be extremely long, as I will need to pull quotes from interviews, earlier chapters in the book, and other books by McCarthy. So hopefully those who're really interested will bear with me.

First some background/foundation: I fully believe, and freely assume throughout this writing, that McCarthy is 100% in opposition to the judge. Everything the judge says is precisely what McCarthy finds to be evil. I feel like this is not a very common point of view, and may well be a sticking point for a lot of people in swallowing the rest of what I have to say. So let me digress further and pull a quote from one of his interviews:

In his August 2005 Vanity Fair interview, he told Richard Woodward that Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is "pretty much pure evil". (This interview is really hard to find. I only was able to get it through my university's library. It does not seem to be on any website anywhere, and I do not have an electronic copy to link to. Sorry. So y'all are gonna have to either take my word for it or find this interview yourselves somewhere.) So, when I first started reading McCarthy a few years ago, I was super, fully convinced that he was a pure nihilist. I really thought that he was speaking through the judge in Blood Meridian and through Chigurh in NCFOM, and that his books, especially BM, were essentially paeans to war and violence and the dark side of man. I gradually started backing away from that reading of him, and this quote was the final nail in the coffin. He definitely is not speaking through Chigurh, and I'm comfortable inferring thence that he is not speaking through the judge, either. He does believe that evil exists, he has his own particular sense of it, and he is trying to expound upon it.

Now, most people who disagree with me on this point will probably pull this quote from his 1992 New York Times interview with the same Richard Woodward:

" 'There's no such thing as life without bloodshed,' McCarthy says philosophically. 'I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.' "

That quote totally sold me on his nihilism when I first started reading his books, and from what I've seen in various academic papers and on various forums, it's sold many other people on McCarthy's nihilism, as well. However, after I started seeing more in him than utter hopelessness, I started wondering if that quote was perhaps saying something other than what it seemed to be saying. And I believe that is the case. Now, I don't quite have space here to develop this idea fully, so I will just link you to another Goodreads discussion where I go into this in (probably way too much) detail. (See post #23, middle of the post.):

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...

The condensed form of what I write there is that what McCarthy holds to be evil is any attempt to "remake" mankind, or more generally, the world. Think of the following scene in chapter 2 of BM, a conversation between the hermit and the kid:

"God made this world, but he didn't make it to suit everyone, did he? [said the hermit.]
I dont believe he much had me in mind [said the kid].
Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world's he seen that he liked better?
I can think of better places and better ways.
Can ye make it be?
No."

Or how about the famous quote from the opening chapter, when the narrator says "[N]ot again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay."? Or when the judge says "Whoever builds in reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe[.]" Or when the judge crumples up that Spanish boot and tosses it into the fire, and the narrator writes how "he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at its creation." There are a few others like this throughout the book, all circling around the idea of a man attempting to remake the world to fit his vision of it. And *that* is what I believe (and I argue, in that link above) McCarthy holds to be evil. And I believe that this idea is what McCarthy is getting at in that NYT quote: The idea that man is a certain way. Some is good, some is bad. But those who seek to remake man are the truly evil. And I believe that evidence for this idea can be found in just about all of his books.

So that wraps up the intro. I've only attempted to establish so far that a) McCarthy is *not* speaking through the judge and is *not* a nihilist and b) the judge is the embodiment of McCarthy's conception of evil, and his vision of evil consists in man trying to remake the world to fit his vision of it (Think Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pinochet, etc.)

So now for the final chapter: So there's this big 28-year-or-so gap between the end of chapter 22 and the beginning of chapter 23. And regardless of what happens to the kid/man in those intervening years, by the time he becomes the man, he's failed. He has quite literally failed at life, and is destined to be damned. I believe his killing of Elrod is evidence of this moral degeneration. I'm aware of what a problematic scene that is, in the sense of "Is it justified self-defense or not?". But I definitely believe it's meant to solidify the man's journey back down the path of evil. I have several reasons for this, but chief among them is that *before* he kills Elrod, he tells that group of boys, the bonepickers, that he's on his way to Fort Griffin, which is acknowledged as "the biggest town for sin in all Texas". I definitely get a Dante's Inferno kind of vibe from that. He knows full well what Fort Griffin is. It's hell. And the judge is the devil. (More on that below.) The judge doesn't come there looking for him. He goes there looking for the judge. That's where the judge resides. At that epicenter of sin. Even when he's about to enter the bar, the Beehive (what an unbelievably creepy, horrifying name, if read in this context), where he finds the judge, he gets to the door and "look[s] back a last time at the street and at the random windowlights let into the darkness and at the last pale light in the west and the low dark hills around." Emphasis on *last time*. He knows full well where he is and what he's doing. So I think. And him killing Elrod is indicative of that. Especially since, as I said above, he was on his way to Griffin even before he killed Elrod.

So then you have to wonder what happens to the man in the outhouse. The most common thoughts are a) he's murdered, or b) he's sodomized, and then murdered. I had an interesting take on this for awhile. In light of the whole moral descent mentioned above, I wondered whether that "hug" in the outhouse might not have been a "welcome to the dark side". Or maybe it's the judge fully engulfing him, where in a sense, the judge now owns him. And maybe what the other men see in the outhouse is that little girl who went missing.

I think this is interesting, and there's a part of me that still wonders if that's the intent, but I no longer really believe it. I think he is killed there. And my thought process follows:

Note what happens to the members of the Glanton gang. For the most part, they all wind up dead. But it's not as simple as that. Think about who does *not* die in the massacre? There's David Brown, but he wasn't even there and he dies shortly after anyway. More importantly there's the idiot, who I half believe embodies some amount of goodness (I mean, if evil consists of trying to impose one's vision on the world... Well, I don't believe the idiot even *has* a vision of the world.) At the very least, the idiot is *not* evil. Aside from him, the only ones who survive the massacre are ones who have attempted to go against the judge at one point or another: Toadvine (who was pissed over the massacre of the Tiguas in chapter 13 and even put a gun to the judge's head over the killing of the Apache kid), Tobin (who is *always* seeming at odds with the judge), and the kid. So might it not be the case that the judge kills the gang members (or causes, or maybe just *allows* their deaths) only once they've fully given in to him? Because we see that Toadvine sides with the judge at the well, and he's found hanged next. And Tobin seems to have a further break from the judge in chapters 20 and 21 (the biggest one being that after he tells the kid to stop listening to the judge, the *narrator* refers to Tobin as the "priest" for the one and only time in the book, not the "expriest"). And then we never see him again. Maybe the implication being that he's never killed? He fully breaks from the judge, and thus the judge has no power over him? Similarly, we never hear about the idiot. Maybe the people who are safe from the judge are those who don't listen to him?

So I think this is what happens to the the man. We have a pattern of the gang members only being killed after they've fully given themselves over to the judge. It may well be that the idiot and Tobin are living happily somewhere else. I think it's very telling that the only two characters whose ends we don't see are the ones that never surrender to the judge. And I think that the fact the the man is volitionally heading to Fort Griffin indicates that by this point in his life, he's fully given in to the judge, and thus the time is right for him to meet his end.

So, to recap: Most of what I said above has nothing to do with my interpretation of the ending. It's background, foundation. Because, if you think the judge is McCarthy's mouthpiece, well, I need to try to convince you otherwise, or you're not going to buy a single thing I say. But the main points are a) the man is a fallen soul even when chapter 23 begins. This is evidenced by him being on his way to Fort Griffin even before he kills Elrod. He's already given in to the dark side, he knows it, he knows where he's going (as evidenced by that *last time* line), and he knows what's in store for him. And b) he is indeed killed in the outhouse. This is the fate awaiting those who fully give in to the judge. So the whole book is the story of some kid who has a shit life, turns into a monster, is horrified at what he becomes, attempts to reform, and fails miserably, only to be damned to hell. Yikes. That's awful. That's just brutal.

(Running out of room... Continued on next post.)

Next: Aside from the relevant plot points, probably the most interesting bit in chapter 23 to me is: McCarthy actually reveals the judge to be supernatural. And he does so in such a clever, toying way. It's beautiful. Throughout BM, McCarthy does a fantastic job of attributing all sorts of supernatural properties to the judge, yet subsequently hedging. For instance, he is a giant hairless albino who speaks damn near every language on earth and seems to have an unlimited amount of knowledge about the world. Well, maybe he's just a freak of nature and hyperintelligent, not supernatural. All the supernatural, spooky-sounding stuff in the Tobin chapter is put into the mouth of Tobin, so maybe he's just embellishing. In Chapter 12, the judge rightly predicts David Brown's hanging in Chapter 22, but maybe that's just a lucky guess. In the last chapter, when the man meets the judge at the Beehive, McCarthy writes how the judge "seemed little changed or none in all these years". Well, maybe he actually is changed, but just doesn't *seem* it. The judge asks the man "Where is Shelby, whom you left to the mercies of Elias in the desert?" The judge could not possibly know about this, but maybe that's just a lucky guess as well. That is, maybe the judge simply assumes the kid didn't have it in him to kill Shelby. And even on the last page or two, when McCarthy writes about how the judge is dancing and singing and doesn't sleep and will never die, the judge himself says these things. In every instance above, there's something supernatural implied about the judge, which is subsequently retracted or hedged or explained away or which can be explained away without recourse to the supernatural.

However, there is a major instance when McCarthy lets his guard down: In the same breath as the judge asks the man about Shelby, he mentions "Tate whom you abandoned in the mountains". There is NO WAY the judge could know this, or even guess this. Unless you're willing to accept some REALLY lateral thinking (such as maybe Tate didn't actually get killed by Elias's men after the kid abandoned him, and then maybe he made his way back to the gang and told the judge what happened, but McCarthy chose not to include this scene), this then becomes an instance where the judge knows something he can't unless he is some sort of supernatural entity. Because the gang isn't even *around* when the kid comes upon Tate and his lamed horse, and Elias falls upon the kid and Tate sleeping (and presumably kills Tate) before they even make it back to the gang. So how does the judge know this?

And then there's the epilogue. I've come to believe very strongly two things about the epilogue. One, it serves as a refutation of the judge. As I mentioned above, I fully believe that McCarthy has set the judge up as something to be reviled. Whatever the judge says or stands for is what McCarthy finds evil. Furthermore, no character in the book ever really poses a philosophical challenge to the judge. That's what I believe the purpose of the epilogue is. If the epilogue merely affirmed what the judge has already said, if the man in the epilogue were the judge himself, as a lot of people believe, I think the epilogue would have no purpose in the book, either philosophically, thematically, or even aesthetically. It would be redundant. I think the purpose is essentially to deny the judge the last word, to hint that he's wrong. The second thing I strongly believe about the epilogue is that the only way to understand it is symbolically. Unfortunately, this requires yet another digression. (To anyone out there still reading this, kudos to you.)

McCarthy seems to have an uncommonly intricate and consistent symbolic infrastructure spread throughout his books. From Outer Dark up to The Road and The Sunset Limited, he seems to use the same symbols over and over and seemingly for the same purposes each time. E.g., coins feature prominently in two scenes in Blood Meridian, in All the Pretty Horses, and in No Country for Old Men. Each time, coins are linked to the concept of fate or man's attempt to control his fate: There's the coin trick scene in BM (which hints at the possibility that the judge is in control of just about everything), there's the kid's dream in BM (this one doesn't seem to be much about fate on the surface, except when you realize that the coldforger is hammering out the coin "like his own conjectural destiny"), there's the cara y cruz scene in ATPH, and then Chigurh's use of the coin in NCFOM. So now, anytime I see coins mentioned in his works, I wonder whether it's an idle reference or if he's saying something deeper. He mentions bats in Child of God and Blood Meridian, each time comparing them to souls of the damned. He mentions fire a lot, most obviously in The Road, but also in just about every one of his books, and it always seems to be linked to the inherent goodness inside a person or a person's yearning for goodness. (Caveat: Child of God seems to be the sole exception here. CoG uses fire on multiple occasions to be an agent of destruction... I'm not sure how this fits in with my interpretation here... Maybe it fits, and I'm just looking at it the wrong way. Maybe he decided to use it differently in that book. And maybe I'm just wrong.) He uses caves a lot, most notably in Child of God and the man's dream in The Road, and on two separate occasions (once in CoG, once in TR) describes the damp walls of the cave as looking like the innards of some great beast. He uses shadows in just about every one of his books, frequently describing them as if they existed independently of the body which cast them and seeming to link them to the wicked side of man. He uses stone a LOT, seemingly to refer to man's intransigence, his stubbornness, his desire to shape the world to his will. Cf. e.g. the following conversation between Suttree and himself during one of his "existential crisis" moments:

"What do you believe?
I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu.
Equally?
It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.
Of what would you repent?
Nothing.
Nothing?
One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all."

Then there's what the judge says about the man who builds in stone versus the man who builds in reeds. And also, there's the entirety of The Stonemason, which, as best as I understand it, seems to be about a man who tries to control too much in his family and winds up causing a lot of bad stuff to happen. Over and over, stone seems to be the bad aspect, the hard aspect, the *judge* aspect of man. And there's whiteness: I find it very interesting that the professor, White, in The Sunset Limited is so similar in philosophy to the judge and is identified *solely* by the characteristic of being white. And obviously one of the most memorable descriptions of the judge is how white he is. I believe their whiteness is not a racial trait, but a symbol of their blankness, the nihilism that they hold.

Aside from these, over and over and over do we see cryptic references to bones, to mules, to wolves, to doubles/doppelgangers, to the sun, to idiots, to orphans, etc. Some of these I believe I can reasonably interpret or find frequent associations with, others less so.

The point of this inexcusably long digression is to argue that McCarthy uses the same symbols across his books, sometimes across books separated by decades, and he uses them in a consistent way. I believe that understanding his symbolism, finding reasonable, coherent, frequent associations with his symbols sheds a great deal of light on the epilogue.

Now, despite the fact that I don't understand it fully, I think that some of the things I mentioned above form a good start. First, as I mention in that other Goodreads discussion linked above, the whole "striking fire out of the rock" bit is biblical. It comes out of the book of Judges, specifically, Judges 6:20-24. In that story, the entity who comes to strike the fire out of the rock is a messenger of God. Next, if you're willing to accept my interpretations of his symbolism, this messenger of God (now, I don't hold to any specific interpretation of God in McCarthy's books.. Yahweh? Jesus? Allah? Doesn't seem to matter.. Just *some* God, a creator, who is the font of all things good.) comes and strikes fire (read: the inherent, perhaps latent, goodness in man) out of the rock (read: the hard, selfish aspect of man that wants to remake the world the way he thinks it should be) which God has put there. Read in the context of The Road, with all its talk of "carrying the fire", this makes a lot of sense to me. It also sheds light on what may be McCarthy's belief as to how good came to be in what is often such a cold, terrible, heartless world: There are just a few people, like the man in the epilogue or the boy in The Road, Christ-like figures, who come into the world already good and show/inspire others to be the same. Also, the fact that the epilogue is taking place "[i]n the dawn" is a good sign, since the sun is the only thing, it seems, that can harm the judge. He's always so concerned about wearing a hat, and he burns when he's in it for too long. He even says to Tobin and the kid at the well, when he's telling them to make up their minds and get a move on: "Yonder sun is like the eye of God and we will cook impartially upon this great siliceous griddle I do assure you." Point is, there's *something* that can do harm to the judge. Now, you can interpret that symbol however you like (I'm partial to God, as mentioned by the judge himself, and which goes back to Plato's Form of the Good and his Metaphor of the Sun, which I feel like I read somewhere that McCarthy was familiar with. But there are other possibilities), but the point is that the sun represents something that can oppose the judge. And so the epilogue taking place in the dawn indicates victory over the judge.

What I *can't* make heads or tails of is the bit with the people searching for bones. Bones are one of those symbols that gets used over and over again in McCarthy, frequently in ways that seem to scream "THIS IS A SYMBOL", but I have no idea what it means. There's the bit where the judge cracks open the legbone and lets the marrow drip into the fire. In the desert after they leave the well, the kid and Tobin are hiding among bones. Hell, Tobin even fashions a cross out of bones. When the man gets to Fort Griffin at the end, he walks towards the bar between "ricks" of bones. Bones are conspicuously mentioned in the opening paragraph of The Crossing, much the same way that fire is mentioned in the opening paragraph of ATPH. Is this supposed to be death? The physical, non-spiritual aspect of creation? History/the past/man's memories? Something else? I can't pull it together. But I definitely get the sense I'm onto something, so if you happen to have noticed something with bones in this book or another of his, please, by all means, pass it on.

And that's that. I could surely go on, but I've already reduced the probability of anyone reading this to the end to near nothing. So, so long for now. If anyone has any questions or comments or thinks he can poke holes in my ideas or knows what "bones" means or has any thoughts that supplements what I've written in some way, please post back. I'd love to hear it.

Ed, this is my second favorite novel and I have read many essays and books about it. I have never come across the idea that "the judge is McCarthy's mouthpiece". Anyone who knows from whence the research for this book derives, a large portion of it being "My Confession" by Samuel Chamberlain, knows this is not merely a fictional story to promote some neo-gnostic nihilism.

That being said, I agree with you that the judge does not represent McCarthy's personal philosophy. Having read all his work, I can pretty much say that the characters are so variegated in their dialog and pontifications, that we can scarce derive a cohesive world-view from the sum. If anything, I might conclude that Sunset Limited may be the best representation of his inner conflict. And that is wild-ass speculation also.

If you are the minority in your opinion on this, then you are to be counted among the wise who can see that for all the arcane gnosis in BM, the point is simple. That all violence is ultimately self destructive. The root of violence is not ignorance, but fear. The devil (judge) is the scapegoat mechanism woven throughout the tapestry of human cultures. The judge is all of us.

I will respond to part II of your posts shortly.

My observations on the ending, and the symbolism of bones.

It is very easy to see The Judge as an archetype of human violence against nature and fellow man.

There seem to be several instances throughout the book where an individual has the means to kill the judge yet no one actually does it.

The following statement by the judge defines what he is: "That which exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent".

Knowledge and will to power. Knowledge of good and evil. If evil is the privation of the good (Aquinas) then the “muddled in between” is all that man can ever hope for. Knowledge in service of the good is nigh impossible within a world subject to futility.

The kid carries a bible, which throughout the novel is mentioned indirectly as a sort of a mute emblem. The kid was also illiterate, "no word of which he could read". What speaks then? Nature?

"A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The Judge smiled. Books lie, he said. God dont lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct ... and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools."

Nature is not a lucid witness of the truth either. Man is left to divine his own meaning if he will not give up the relentless pursuit of dominion and conquest of nature and other men.

Hence the statement, "not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay".

All striving to shape the world to our will is, in the end, futility. We will be made husks by the black tides of inevitable death. The kid comes to this realization, but does not heed it. In the ending scene with the whore in the saloon, he seemingly cannot perform. His impotence is symbolic there I think of our inability to maintain any control over the progress against the death drive. Everything we reproduce falls prey to it. As if we really are impotent all along. We are Dust, and ash and dry bone. Antic clay. Our mere substance no different than the desert itself outside of Eden. The wandering of Cain is our universal lot. This is illustrated beautifully in this section:

"The kid rose and looked about at this desolate scene and then he saw alone and upright in a small niche in the rocks an old woman kneeling in a faded rebozo with her eyes cast down. He made his way among the corpses and stood before her. ... She did not look up. ... He spoke to her in a low voice. He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships. He told her that he would convey her to a safe place, some party of her countrypeople who would welcome her and that she should join them for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die. He knelt on one knee, resting the rifle before him like a staff. Abuelita, he said. No puedes escucharme? He reached into the alcove and touched her arm. ... She weighed nothing. She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years."

How appropriate that today is Ash Wednesday.

"Why would they respond in horror to the scene inside the jakes if it was just the naked kid?"

I think it was the kid left in the jakes by the judge. But the judge has brutalized him. Someone mentioned sodomy. Yes, that, and more.

I just finished this book last night and I, too, am somewhat struggling with the ending. The epilogue, truthfully has me stymied. I guess I understand it as time moving on, regardless of what transpired in the past on that very ground, it is just "washed clean" rewritten endlessly. No ghosts haunt that land. Nature is that way. Just renewal and rebirth, and death only to begin something else anew. Over and Over.

And that's what I think the Judge is meant to embody. The thought of fate, of nature, (God?) indiscriminately doling out the punishments and rewards, easy deaths, horrible torturous ones, the endless turning of the stars above that terrible, austere, but somehow beautiful landscape. Some of Mr. McCarthy's most beautiful, poetic sentences are describing the desert, finding so much beauty amidst death always lurking, the extremes of weather, the lack of water, that terrifying sun bearing witness to it all.

I think the judge killed the Kid. I also think he killed the little girl and let the Kid see it as a final, horrible vision of what this life had to offer him. And maybe it's what he deserved as the kid was almost as bad as the Judge himself.

No, actually, I change my mind. The third man pissing in the mud is the Kid. The terrible sight in the outhouse is the body of the missing girl, violated and then killed by the judge. All for the viewing pleasure of the Kid. A little something to help the Kid remember the judge. As if he could ever forget.

What missing girl? Page number, please. I have not picked up the book in a while.

So you think the Kid walked away alive from the jakes?

page 347, right after the Kid is done with the whore and returns to the bar. First full paragraph.

I did not pick that up in my first reading, that it could be the little lost girl dead in the jakes with the judge. Could be. McCarthy is a careful writer, though, no? Wouldn't he clearly state what the Kid saw?

I don't know. I think he wanted to keep the ending ambiguous. Which he did! LOL

I don't think the Kid spent too much time processing what he did or saw others do. He didn't seem the type to be moved by his emotions or spend too much time contemplating the whys and hows and whatfors. Maybe the man in the epilogue digging holes is the Kid?

Interesting interpretation. I never thought The Kid was the man in the Epilogue. I re-read the last several pages, and the Epilogue. It's an entire new reading.

Yeah, I'm not 100% convinced myself! But, it CAN be a legitimate interpretation as the ending is ambiguous. Why bring up a lost little girl? I'm sure the two men who looked into the outhouse wouldn't be very moved by viewing a dead man. I'm sure they've seen very many dead men in various heinous combinations of ways to die. But a little girl? That would be shocking to anyone, even if only for a minute or two, hardcases that these guys were. And, were zippers even invented and used in the late 1800's? Because after the Man visited the whore he "buttoned his trousers" and then later the man pissing in the mud buttons his trousers... maybe a weak connection, but maybe not.

Great book though. One of my new faves.

The whole novel builds up to the final encounter in the jakes between the judge and the kid, and yet it's the only scene in the book to which we're deprived access. All the violence in the novel culminates at this point, and we can infer -- despite already having seen people scalped, burned alive, mutilated and hacked at, as well as babies' skulls being bashed against rocks -- that this is the single grisliest scene in the book, bar none. Of course, we can't know exactly what happens to the kid at the end, but there are some definite clues that allow us to speculate about his fate.

First of all, whatever it is that takes place in the jakes, we know one thing for certain: the judge kills the kid. All the evidence in the text supports this. That final embrace at the end where the judge gathers the kid in his arms against his “immense and terrible flesh” is what the judge has wanted all along, and now he finally gets it.

It’s important also to consider the details of the scene going on inside with the dead bear and the dancers, as they correspond symbolically to the event taking place in the outhouse. Certain images like the “row of tallow candles” (338) become significant later on, after the judge has killed the kid, when it says “all the candles had gone out save one and it guttered uneasily in its grease like a votive lamp” (347). The row of candles signifies the remaining lives of the Glanton Gang, of which only the judge and the kid are left. When all the candles have gone out but one, we know that the kid has been killed.

Another important line, and perhaps the only concrete detail related to the kid’s fate in the jakes, is revealed here, “The bear lay on the stage in an immense pool of blood.” Throughout the bar scene, the judge continually tries to get the kid to partake in the dance, which would link him symbolically with the dancing bear that is shot. The kid, however, refuses to participate in the dance and takes no part in the judge’s war ideology. But this is not enough to save the kid and the judge kill him anyway, confirming his statement earlier that “There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. Bears that dance, bears that dont” (347). If we relate the kid, as the judge does, with the bear that is shot, we can read the line almost as though it says “The kid lay on the stage in an immense pool of blood.” And this is really our only clue as to what the judge does to the kid in the jakes.

But in piecing together what exactly happens in the outhouse, we must also consider the likely possibility that the judge rapes the kid too, for which there is strong evidence in the novel. The judge, who earlier in the jail scene had tried to get the kid to come closer so that he could “touch” him, displays a strong lusting for the kid. Moreover, the act of male-to-male rape constitutes the ultimate kind of shame for the kid, who lives on a Western frontier where masculinity is prided upon as though it were a competition. And we can only imagine that the judge would want the kid to feel this shame.

So what actually happens? Of course it’s all speculation, but we have to imagine it’s something really, truly fucking awful. It’s helpful to recreate the scene in a Faustian sense, as the book carries evident parallels to the German legend. In most versions of the story, Mephistopheles, after letting Faust live for a certain number of years, kills Faust in a gruesome manner, and then carries him off to hell. And is this not what the judge does to the kid? Indeed. This is what I think happens to the kid at the end. After he steps into the jakes, and the judge “gathers him into his arms,” the two begin wrestling with one another. The judge, who is of course so much physically stronger than the kid, dominates this struggle, and manages to take off the kid’s clothes. With this done, the judge probably starts raping the kid very aggressively, possibly even mutilating the kid’s lower body. The judge then begins to smash and pummel the kid’s body, ripping apart limbs, pulling out organs, shredding apart his body and disemboweling him to the point where all his blood and innards lay strewn along the floor and walls, chunks of brain and eyeballs scattered about. The judge literally destroys the kid in the ultimate way. And so this, I think, is pretty close to what the three men at the end see when they open the door to look in.

After detailing the beauty and hostility of the landscape McCarthy also describes the atrocities committed by the Glanton gang. However, the events in the outhouse are left to the readers imagination. The outhouse is Orwell's room 101. It is your worst nightmare. What happens in there is the most evil and heinous act that the reader's mind can conjure. It left me wondering if that is the intention. The author wants the reader to look at the monster within. The outhouse as a metaphor for the basest of imaginings.

We must not, as some have here, confuse our readerly shortcomings with authorial quality. One does not write a novel of such depth and deliberation as Blood Meridian to simply 'rush' the ending. Throw all authorial intent out the window in your reception of this or any text. Do not ask what McCarthy 'meant,' with the novel, rather focus on what the text does tell you. The ending does not obfuscate the 'point' of the novel. It is the point. Has War reached an end? Have we reached the zenith of humanity's capability for violence? Every generation feels that it has witnessed the ultimate in human atrocity, and every generation is wrong. The source of all human violence, as message 24 by Tony above has hinted, is imagination. The text leads us down a path of cruelty only to leave us each alone with our own possibilities. CandyStripeBlue's message 23 is but one imagining, as obvious and uninteresting as it is. That type of finality described is what we all expected to read regarding the horror of what was left in that jake. Yet true horror, as McCarthy has seen to, must be left unwritten, constrained only by the limits of each reader's individual imagination.

The only conclusive information McCarthy offers on what occurred is in the German title heading at the start of the chapter, "Sie Müssen schlafen aber ich muss tanzen". That translates to, "they have to sleep but I have to dance". That's the most conclusive information we can draw on the fate of Bear Girl and The Kid.

Would it be too simple to think of the Judge as Death? It would explain why he never sleeps or dies and why he keeps a book of all the creatures he meets (who must have his permission to be alive).

The Kid carries the bible in the hope that some of the goodness and guidance that he has heard lives there will rub off on him out of charity. He knows he does not deserve it, and can never understand (read) it.

CandyStripedBlue wrote: "The whole novel builds up to the final encounter in the jakes between the judge and the kid, and yet it's the only scene in the book to which we're deprived access. All the violence in the novel cu..."

This post contains the correct answer.

The kids dead baby, the kids dead.

McCarthy tells us throughout the book that the judge has super powers, but I do not feel that he is any more evil than Glanton.

Why does the ex priest believe the judge intends to kill the kid when they meet at the well. Why does Glanton's death change the dynamic between the two characters? The judge does not kill the other two gang members he meets there.

The introduction of the judge and Glanton was a very confusing scene for me. I read it over at least 4 times to figure out who was there and who said what. Is this just me or is McCarthy deliberately confusing the judges entrance?

Any help?

It's clear the kid's been killed, raped or both by the end.

One of the men who peek inside once the deed is done says something along the lines of "dear god" - a reaction we never get from anybody at any point in the novel, not when the Comanches are scalping Captain White's men, not when the Glanton gang passes the infamous dead-baby-tree in Mexico, not when we and everybody else witness the rape, the pillage and the murder that are strung throughout the entire novel.

Yet we get this "dear god" as closing lines to an offscreen event. The reaction on the one hand and the lack of imagery on the other build an event that is literally indescribable. Rape/murder are obvious interpretations, but in any case we're meant to imagine "punishment worse than it can be described". Make that what you wish.

There is no clear evidence the kid was killed and there is no clear evidence the kid is alive. Simply speaking the author would not tell. Assumptions can be made and every one has his opinion. I will go with Chris Campion 9th comment.
***And I will add that the judge is not a human being but a supernatural creature/the devil / as he says he won't die and he never sleeps. How he is found in the first place is weird little bit because he was sitting on a rock in the plain where there are no rocks near but the one he sits on. As I read I felt the judge to be everywhere. In Glanton's bang almost everyone has a first encounter with the judge.

The book's ending is the most mysterious ending I have read, yet. A whole year can be easily spent on discussing it.

* Chris Campion 9th comment
"Closing of the coffin. That's excellent. I found it kind of bittersweet in that the kid never really got affection or love, and yet, the judge kind of does that when he brings him into his arms. Yet, it's also the end for the kid too.

One of notices, that also ties back to the beginning of the story, is right around that last scene, the stars are falling. It reminded of the first page when the father tells that the stars fell when the kid was born. Kind of comes full circle I guess."

Ahmed wrote: "There is no clear evidence the kid was killed and there is no clear evidence the kid is alive. Simply speaking the author would not tell. Assumptions can be made and every one has his opinion. I wi..."

I have to give props to Mark on noticing the closing of the jakes as though a coffin. These discussions made me reread the ending a bunch of times, then I noticed the falling of the stars. I don't know if that has any real meaning, but was interesting to me at the least. And I agree with you that The Judge seems to be more than a mortal man, just like Anton seems to be more than that in No Country.
I just read a book Understanding Cormac McCarthy by Frye. I'd recommend any serious read of McCarthy's work to check it out. It points out a lot of different philosophies that are going on in BM.

The thing is,(as with Thomas Pynchom) Cormac McCarthy is an abstract writer with a free flow of plot,ideas and landscape with a large lump of magic philosophy.
The landscape becomes the land of the old testament,a barren land with almost halluciant quality with an agonizing pilgrimagic journey; waiting for the ten commandments or at least one of them. We get none,only illusions that the Devil may be in our mist.
I would welcome comments..Brian Ralph(Scarborough)UK.

My theory is that the judge Holden does something very very nasty to the missing girl in the Jakes, having the man (boy) looking at him. The man (boy) may the person peeing outside who suggests not to enter the loo, after he's seen what happened.
Judge Holden has always had a special interest for kids. At the beginning of the book, after the first massacre, he kills and scalps the little Apache after caring about and playing with him. In another setion of the book, he says kids should be thrown with wolves and only the strongers should survive. He takes kids life under his personal care and that's what he I guess did to the girl.

Am I reaching or has anyone else interpreted the epilogue as the preparation of land for the laying of a railroad? I believe mass construction started a little after the mid 1800s. We just laid witness to the violent consequences resulting from the Mexican American war, and for some reason I looked at this as "here is a repeating cycle of more violence to come", because as history eludes, the construction of the railroad throughout the west created still more violence in consequence... I wonder this too because of the beginning quote in the novel, where the Chinese and European scholar are debating the evils and consequences of "intelligence". Did anyone also notice that not only did the hermit describe the evils of man, he specifically calls machinery out as one of the worst atrocities man had created... Now maybe in the epilogue, we are seeing the beginnings of a new violent chapter, as predicted, with the introduction of the railroad. Like the judge eluded, violence in man is a continuous fate.

Am I reaching here?

Definitely not much of a reach imo, Sunny. Either a railroad or a fence, a "closing in of the west". All apologies to Harold Bloom, but I think he really missed the boat in his take on the epilogue. He says that the idea of the Epilogue Man fencing in the west is

"a very bad interpretation. That two-handed implement is, as I say, doing one thing and one thing only: it is striking fire which has been put into the rock, clearly a Promethean motif, and he is clearly contrasted with creatures who are either goulish [sic] human beings, if they are human beings, or already are, in fact, shades, looking for bones for whatever nourishment that might bring about. The contrast between striking fire and looking for bones is extraordinary. And I cannot see that as any kind of allegory of anything that has happened to the American West." (from "Tragic Ecstasy" in "Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy" by Peter Josyph)

After the episodes with the buffalo hunter and the bonepickers in the beginning of Chapter 23, there's just no way we're not supposed to connect that to the epilogue. If people are looking for bones there, they must be buffalo bones, which means it's the prairie in at least the late 1800s. Putting the Epilogue Man in such a setting pretty much forces him to be bringing an end to the west in some sense.

Obviously there's a crucial symbolic level, which is what Bloom's getting at. And to a large extent I agree with what he says there. But I cannot imagine one can divorce that from the "literal" level. Nor vice versa. These two need to play off each other.

I agree, but I'm wracking my brain trying to figure out what exactly it is that this "man" and his group are doing. I may just be ignorant of the context, or maybe I'm simply not understanding the literal wording here, but I'm not seeing what lighting fires in the ground have to do with bone excavation, unless this was an old method I'm not familiar with. I was thinking they were dropping dynamite or something mildly explosive to perhaps prep the land for new construction?

I can get behind PART of what Bloom is saying, but only because McCarthy mixes the supernatural with the factual throughout the entire book... I'm sure there is some deeper meaning here but he still gives us literal context... Maybe I'm just not understanding the literal context.

Blood Meridian. Dense, Difficult. I flipped though all the blocks of prose to get to the dialogue. Makes my list of the most over-rated book of all time. Maybe in the Universe. The only thing good about the ending was that I finally got to it....

Hi Sunny,

If you're interested, check out

http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/topic/t...

I post under the handle efscerbo.

The gist is that over the course of the novel, McCarthy sets up an association with stone and the physical world and with fire and the spiritual world, perhaps even God. The "stone" world is the one the judge rules over, and the only way to break free of him is to realize the "fire" world that's out there. (See "The godfire" in Chapter 17, where the narrator says "each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be". "[T]he first and the last" in a section titled "The godfire" is quite telling. See also Sheriff Bell in NCFOM: "They say the eyes are the windows to the soul", and note how carefully McCarthy tracks who of the Glanton gang have light reflected in their eyes when they sit around the fires at night and whose eyes remain black.)

So in the Epilogue there's a man striking fire out of the rock. To my mind, this is someone (a Christ figure? McCarthy himself? an arbitrary person who opposes the judge?) coming to help free people from the control of the judge by announcing/revealing this fire world that's out there.

In my opinion, this ties in with the sleep/awake theme that runs through McCarthy's corpus: E.g., Outer Dark opens with Culla waking up, the title of "All the Pretty Horses" comes from a lullaby (i.e., when you're sending someone to sleep), The Border Trilogy ends in COTP with Billy going to sleep, the final line of NCFOM is "And then I woke up", the opening line of The Road is "When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night", the opening line of The Counselor is "L: Are you awake? // C: No." This idea of being asleep vs. being awake seems (in my opinion) to be meant in a spiritual/religious sense. And that's largely how I view the epilogue: The Epilogue Man is coming to wake people up. To let them know the judge is out there and how he operates and how we can perhaps prevail over him.

However, I will say I haven't the slightest clue how the bones factor in. Despite my best efforts, I've not been able to find a reasonable association with bones in McCarthy's work. Perhaps my thoughts on this will change if I ever find one.

I don't know if anyone will see this but I'd like to thank all of you for the intelligent, thought provoking ideas posted here. I just finished the book and wow it was violent and deep.

I'm not a student of CM to the degree that others of you are. My take was that Blood Meridian is a sort of "Dark Testament" or "What the Land Saw." It's an alternative to the New Testament which tells us that "after you die, you will live again" -- a message of peace and good news. BM is a dark testament, a book that says, "you may live again, but first, you WILL die." All life is equal in death. While the book contains violence, I didn't find it to be a book about "violence." Whether someone is raped and mutilated or starves to death or hanged or stabbed or shot or has their face cut off -- to the eyes of the observing land, it is all the same, just the inevitable ending of nature. I think the gruesomeness of the ending scene is a sort of mockery of the idea that somehow the Kid would escape the fate all the others faced. As in, if you think you will not die, you are a fool, and let me show you how much of a fool you are. The act was more extreme and gruesome simply because the narrator saved him until the end and created a foolish hope that some other end was possible. The judge's words and deeds are not literal, but they represent the magnitude of equality between all humans and horses and trees and all of nature. His power and strength and knowledge represent the magnitude of the ubiquity of death. The meridian is something in the middle. On the one side life. On the other side death. In the middle the blood meridian, the great equalizer. The New Testament is a story on the side of life. BM is a story on the side of death. Both are equal in that each is 50% of the whole. Each is 50% of infinity, or each is 50% of nothing, which in either the two are equal to each other.

Mayor wrote: "...the gruesomeness of the ending scene is a sort of mockery of the idea that somehow the Kid would escape the fate all the others faced. As in, if you think you will not die, you are a fool, and let me show you how much of a fool you are."

And yet, the Judge lives on.

Mkfs wrote: "Mayor wrote: "...the gruesomeness of the ending scene is a sort of mockery of the idea that somehow the Kid would escape the fate all the others faced. As in, if you think you will not die, you are..."

That makes sense in the construct because the judge is the creator of the meridian, the divider, natural law, the cause of death, the separator, he will roll on until all life is dead.

I think the judge killed the kid's embodiment of redemption. And in doing so the kid killed the little girl. At the end when the two confront the jakes their is a man relieving himself and warns them not to look in. He's only described as "the man." The very same way the kid was named in the last two chapters. Basically I think the judge killed whatever goodness the kid had and what he strive to be. And all that was left in him was a monster.

The Judge at the end of the book is not the same Judge that travelled with Glanton. He is instead the Man's own mental rendition of the formerly-genuine article, colored by the years he spent wayward after his half-crazed return from the desert - the Beehive's "Holden" is a symbiotic spectre of an ideal, not a living thing in & of himself.

Tobin's story earlier in the book, about how Holden had the group create black powder out of sulphur, urine, nitre, etc. had, as its sole supernatural element, the Judge's bizarre insertion into the company, the fat man seeming to have appeared at ease on his rock from thin air.

What the Judge did to save the company from their pursuers, though, can be understood as the result of a keen grasp of survival skills, natural biology, chemistry, and an incisive understanding of how to exploit both humanity's vulnerability & its predatory instincts. If he were but some wraith of Manifest Destiny, he wouldn't have to sketch, annotate or calculate the mountains, the currents of the wind, the bats & their flight trajectory that led him to their guano-rich cave - he'd have instead immediately steered the men on a course whose destination he had already preordained, without needing to rely on their scouts.

The remarkable slaughter that results only seems magical because we never see the Judge struggle or fail - we are not afforded any glimpse of him in toil, failure, or engaging in any sort of trial & error. It's easy to assume that he was born into the world middle-aged, with all his reckonings about the world already known - nor is that a creation myth Holden himself would deny, as it affords him considerable power & influence over other men.

As advanced technology is often said to be "indistinguishable from magic" to those with no prior understanding of how mechanical & natural forces work, so too is Holden's accumulated intelligence portrayed to us (by an ex-priest, most notably, who himself would be prone to supernatural interpretations of the mere actual) as devilishly uncanny. In Holden's sketches & annotations, we only see ex-post-facto glimpses of the work he, logically, had to have put in over many years to mold himself into the peculiarly superior specimen he is.

His travelling companions are a gang of confused, aimless, mediocre mass murderers, a mystically-minded lot due to their sheer lack of comprehension, or even curiosity, about the workings of the world. They aren't men who have vague apparitions of ideas about changing the world, like Captain White, who tried to render the delusional imagined glories that small thinking, an obsequious hierarchy & narrow social circles had cultivated into preordination, unto reality, with predictably dire results.

To the Glanton gangsters, the world happens to them; to the Judge, the world has no purpose without man to remake it in his image - to force things to happen. The men, poblanos, Indians all live in sustenance or violence as pointlessly as they die; the Judge (and Glanton himself, to a much lesser extent) act as agents unto themselves upon the world, irrespective of any notions of preordained "fate" or "destiny".

The Judge at the end of the book is, by contrast, a representation of the person he once was. It's the personification of an ideal, or the idealization of a persona: modernity, of a sort. But I'll have to leave the rest for another time.

It seems like the ending was a symbolism about how man tries to control nature and playing god.These things are tied with hybris so you have to pay sooner or later. Or the symbolism was about fate.Man can't hide from it.You can't change fate, it will find you.Maybe what Mccarthy tried to achieve with creating a character like the judge was to point out the nihilistic fact that we are all doomed to the same fate.That this is unbeatable.(As he did with the coins in No Country) and that at the end you will pay your dues either you want it or not.But i am not sure.I think noone is, concerning this part.And maybe that's what it makes this book so brilliant after all.

Really interesting comments/analysis, Ed and others! Finished BM last night, midnight, second time around, couldn't sleep for the shadows of the Judge, Kid, Glanton flitting through my mind with Apache scouts framed on the horizon. . .argh!

I like your interpretation of the Judge taking over characters, making the kid the final conquest in the story. I liken it to his primary exercise throughout: putting the world "into his book" so as to have dominion over everything, lest anything lives "without his permission." To me, that is what some characters resist, and most fail. Your ideas about the fool and the expriest have me thinking that those without philosophy are the holdouts from the final evil that is mankind's "way", represented by the Judge. The fool needs to be physically tethered to the Judge because he cannot be philosophically bound (and lives); the Kid is without philosophy (even carrying a representation of religion though he cannot "read' it) until he perhaps murders his alter ego, another orphan of the world, in effect killing what he is and then going to meet his master in sin-town (again, your idea, thanks); the expriest is the big unknown, a Christ/beyond Christ figure who is alive/dead but, ultimately, his status in the world is "unfindable." Does Toadvine finally give in with the selling of his hat? Can the witness to the inside of the jakes statement "Oh my God" have a double meaning of surprise and (unintentional?) recognition?

It just never stops! After reading many interesting comments here, I have come to view the Epilogue as an allegory for our world. The fire in the holes represent the terrors of man, be they the story of the destruction we have just read, war, holocaust, famine, dropping bombs on Dresden, Nagasaki, London, genocide in Myanmar and on and on. The bone pickers, perhaps, are us, continually following the path of destruction, picking up the charred remains, seeking meaning in the ruins.

Basically, I don't know. . .and I love it. Happy reading, all.

Ed wrote: "Next: Aside from the relevant plot points, probably the most interesting bit in chapter 23 to me is: McCarthy actually reveals the judge to be supernatural. And he does so in such a clever, toying ..."

Ed -- very interesting analysis here, I just read this (several years after you posted it, sorry!). This is one of my favorite novels, and I think you've inspired me to read it yet again.

I haven't scrolled through the entirety of this thread yet, but have you read Religion in Cormac McCarthy's Fiction: Apocryphal Borderlands?

You guys have done some really fine analysis in the posts above. It was a pleasure to read them. I believe if McCarthy wanted one definitive, unambiguous ending, he would have presented it that way. But to use a baseball analogy for literature, Blood Meridian was Cormac McCarthy swinging for the fences.

I'm going from memory here. The girl from the saloon (who cared for the bear) went missing. She was a child. Just before the man enters the jakes, he can hear people in the street looking for her.

My interpretation of the ending is that the judge met the man in the jakes and convinced him to rape and murder the girl. Child predators are the worst among us, and this has been a common theme in McCarthy's work. Throughout Blood Meridian, children go missing, or are quite obviously being abused (I believe Glanton found a nine year old girl, nude and tied to a fence, when he returned the his camp). The Judge's purpose is to bring out the worst in human beings. We call this evil. Each man was asked to pour his heart into the common, and no man's share was judged against another (I realize I got the quote wrong, but I'm rolling from memory). What he asked them to contribute was their humanity.

This is what the kid denied him. He never fully gave himself to the Judge. And the Judge never forgot. The entire evening was orchestrated by the judge, including the dwarf prostitute. The murder in the jakes was the death of the good person the kid had tried to be (taking mercy on his mates, pulling out the arrow for David Brown, not murdering the judge, trying to help the old abuelita in the canyon...). There was a shooting star right before he entered, just as there was when he was born. The kid (now the man) survived the encounter. He was gathered up by the Judge in the sense that he finally gave in to his most deprived instincts. This is why the Judge is dancing. He is victorious. He'll never die because men will always do as he wants.

All of this great commentary is making me want to read it again ...