The Blood of a Thousand Christs
What Does the Conflict Between The kid and The judge Represent in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian?
Ishaan Trismegistus Good and evil is the most common form of dichotomy employed in art throughout history. Blood Meridian, however, uses more unique elements to pose a central conflict: amorality or purity and civilisation or progress. The text accomplishes this through the use of the kid and the judge, respectively. The kid is ambiguous in his actions, a stoic in the sense that he never complains and never expresses any moral compunction towards the actions of the gang. And his attempts at moral action simply result in further detachment suggesting further implications for his purity. …show more content…
The most obvious one if people’s nonchalance towards it, if not their contempt: ranging from not even the dogs caring about a religious procession with a fat priest “tottering”(the word very often used to describe the movements of dogs and horses-beasts of burden) to bless the prisoners in Chihuahua to the kid waking up hungover in a sacristy of a broken down church- sacristy can almost be considered a room with the identity of the church- it has the ceremonial garbs of the clergy and also the parish records. This ‘opinion’ can especially be noted in a description of the country by a native: “This country is give much blood…This is a thirsty country. The blood of a thousand Christs. Nothing”(McCarthy 108.) We must consider the magnitude of his description: Christ was, according to Anselm of Canterbury, the personification of the most divine, and therefore was the only one whose death could absolve mankind of its sins, but according to this man a thousand of these are insufficient to sate the country of its blood lust and sin, directly seen with the massacre around the cross in the aforementioned scene. But unlike all the berserk characters of the text who revel in slaughter and war, the kid is never found to particularly care for it, as the judge states, he had “clemency for the heathen.” In fact after he left Los Angeles, he carries with him “a bible he cannot read,” further providing proof for a similarity to a grail knight. And so one might almost note a discrepancy between the kid and the world, but as written above, he is harshly reminded of his nature and is “divested” of any clemency or religious notions/thought. Can be seen by his callous attitude to Elrod (in hebrew, the name translates to god is the king) and the fact that he lays with a prostitute in a town “mired in
What Does the Conflict Between The kid and The judge Represent in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian?
Ishaan Trismegistus Good and evil is the most common form of dichotomy employed in art throughout history. Blood Meridian, however, uses more unique elements to pose a central conflict: amorality or purity and civilisation or progress. The text accomplishes this through the use of the kid and the judge, respectively. The kid is ambiguous in his actions, a stoic in the sense that he never complains and never expresses any moral compunction towards the actions of the gang. And his attempts at moral action simply result in further detachment suggesting further implications for his purity. …show more content…
The most obvious one if people’s nonchalance towards it, if not their contempt: ranging from not even the dogs caring about a religious procession with a fat priest “tottering”(the word very often used to describe the movements of dogs and horses-beasts of burden) to bless the prisoners in Chihuahua to the kid waking up hungover in a sacristy of a broken down church- sacristy can almost be considered a room with the identity of the church- it has the ceremonial garbs of the clergy and also the parish records. This ‘opinion’ can especially be noted in a description of the country by a native: “This country is give much blood…This is a thirsty country. The blood of a thousand Christs. Nothing”(McCarthy 108.) We must consider the magnitude of his description: Christ was, according to Anselm of Canterbury, the personification of the most divine, and therefore was the only one whose death could absolve mankind of its sins, but according to this man a thousand of these are insufficient to sate the country of its blood lust and sin, directly seen with the massacre around the cross in the aforementioned scene. But unlike all the berserk characters of the text who revel in slaughter and war, the kid is never found to particularly care for it, as the judge states, he had “clemency for the heathen.” In fact after he left Los Angeles, he carries with him “a bible he cannot read,” further providing proof for a similarity to a grail knight. And so one might almost note a discrepancy between the kid and the world, but as written above, he is harshly reminded of his nature and is “divested” of any clemency or religious notions/thought. Can be seen by his callous attitude to Elrod (in hebrew, the name translates to god is the king) and the fact that he lays with a prostitute in a town “mired in