Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers stumbled upon a surplus of Colt's old guns. By arming each Ranger with two five-chambered pistols, they found a tactical advantage against Comanche cavalry.
Crates of revolvers are what enables the Glanton Gang's carnage in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
Though the standard literary approach to the book looks for complex allegory and symbolism to explain the narrative, it is a much simpler. At its core, Blood Meridian is an historically based account of technology in the North American Southwest between the War with Mexico and the Civil War.
Of course, even though the Glanton Gang and the Judge are based on historical events it is still a work of fiction.
And a work of literature, and the Judge's apparent magical-realism in matters of life and death is probably best explained as McCarthy writing his role as author into the work...as author, McCarthy has control of who lives and dies in the story (and his immediately prior novel Suttree had autobiographical elements in both its setting, Knoxville, and Suttree leaving for the West at its end just as McCarthy did before writing Blood Meridian).
Of course, that's just my theory and there is a myriad of more conventional literary analysis by famous scholars in the standard positivist ideology of literary progress, so YMMV.
brudgers•8mo ago
Crates of revolvers are what enables the Glanton Gang's carnage in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
Though the standard literary approach to the book looks for complex allegory and symbolism to explain the narrative, it is a much simpler. At its core, Blood Meridian is an historically based account of technology in the North American Southwest between the War with Mexico and the Civil War.
Of course, even though the Glanton Gang and the Judge are based on historical events it is still a work of fiction.
And a work of literature, and the Judge's apparent magical-realism in matters of life and death is probably best explained as McCarthy writing his role as author into the work...as author, McCarthy has control of who lives and dies in the story (and his immediately prior novel Suttree had autobiographical elements in both its setting, Knoxville, and Suttree leaving for the West at its end just as McCarthy did before writing Blood Meridian).
Of course, that's just my theory and there is a myriad of more conventional literary analysis by famous scholars in the standard positivist ideology of literary progress, so YMMV.