A nietzschean reading of cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the west and The Road

Through his career, as an appreciated American Southern writer, Cormac McCarthy has written on issues such as necrophilia, incest and violence by creating gothic atmospheres and employing grotesque elements to disrupt the norms of the world and the society. Some critics also assure that some of McCarthy's works are the critique of contemporary agendas of the time in which the works were written. While Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985), which is indeed a western novel set in the mid-1800s, can be read as a critique on America's capitalist and expansionist policy against communist Vietnam, McCarthy's recent novel The Road (2006) is considered as a signifier of the crisis of climate change. This thesis offers a Nietzschean reading of the two novels mentioned above, mainly based upon Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, by emphasizing the implicit connection between them. According to Nietzsche, time moves in a circular shape in which everything repeats itself eternally. This philosophy opposes religious doctrines which construct all their norms on a linear time line. The concept of a linear time line serves religions' reward and punishment notions because owing to time's horizontal movement, man can be held responsible for his actions in the past and be rewarded or punished in the future. However, in Nietzsche's circular time, the past is also a point in the future, while the future has already occurred in the past. Taking Nietzsche's philosophy into consideration, in Blood Meridian, McCarthy does not only criticize the violence the U.S. committed, but also reveals that war and destruction are ever-present in human history and they will always prevail. The cauterized world of The Road is the consequence of the violent acts which man performed to rule the world in Blood Meridian. In both novels, the representation of the ambivalent nature of existence that depends on creation as well as destruction is based on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return. By emphasizing the ambivalent nature of the eternal return in history, McCarthy portrays humankind simultaneously entrapped and liberated within the cycle of life. Keywords: Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, The Road, Nietzsche, Eternal Return