Environmental Ethics In Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels

Cormac McCarthy is among the most celebrated contemporary novelists in the United States. Since the1980s, his western novels which are set in the US-Mexico border regions have received accolades from both the reading public and the critical circles. For the profundity of his themes and his unique language style, McCarthy is dubbed as the genuine heir to Hemingway and Faulkner and he is recently mentioned as a promising candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.The existing McCarthy scholarship has been mostly through a sociohistorical approach and focusing on human history and society. These anthropocentric perspectives neglect the centrality of nature and man-nature relationship in McCarthy’s works. McCarthy criticism concerning human-nature relationship has been not only scarce but also fragmented and hitherto there has been no systematic ecocritical inquiry into McCarthy’s western novels.This dissertation investigates the environmental ethics in Cormac McCarthy’s western novels. Unlike traditional ecocriticism, which is preoccupied with nature writing and nature aesthetics, my investigation mainly focuses on man’s relationship with nature, with animals, and with science, the three important ramifications of environmental ethics. Environmental ethics’ critique of anthropocentrism in ecocentrism, biocentrism, and animal rights, and the critique of modern industrialization, specifically of modern science and technology, provide the theoretical background for this research.This dissertation posits that the degradation of nature and the distressful fate of nonhuman animals as exhibited in McCarthy’s western novels demonstrate McCarthy’s critique of anthropocentrism and modern science and technology, and his endorsement of ecocentrism, biocentrism, and animal rights. Furthermore, this dissertation argues that some Chinese scholars might have misinterpreted McCarthy’s characters in terms of their relationship with nature and animals and thus endeavors to correct these misinterpretations by insisting that these characters are also victims of anthropocentrism. Through depicting man’s relationship with nature, animals and science in his western novels, McCarthy reveals that anthropocentrism and scientism as ideologies are deeply imbedded in Western perspectives. Human beings are caught in a web of subjectivity from which they cannot escape. All these contribute to the tragedies of nature, animals, and humans in his western novels.This dissertation concludes that the environmental awareness in McCarthy’s western novels culminates in his latest novel The Road to an environmental apocalypse. If human beings cannot free themselves from the entrapment of anthropocentrism and transform from egocentric beings to ecocentric beings, an environmental catastrophe would not only be inevitable but also imminent.