Quest For Individual's Spiritual Survival At Century's End

Published in 1985,Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is an important transitional work of Cormac McCarthy,a well-known contemporary writer in America.The fiction embodies McCarthy's deep concern over the individual's condition at the end of the 20th century,marking not only the shi:ft of his subject matter from the American South to the West but also the elevated thematic concern in his career.Based on real historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s,Blood Meridian traces the bloody experiences of an anonymous kid who stumbles into a gang of scalpers.Many argue that Blood Meridian deconstructs American exceptionalism and manifests moral nihilism.But too much attention paid to external factors such as social environment and ideologies may result in a relatively pejorative evaluation of the content of the fiction and an overlook of its aesthetic values.By integrating the external historical context of McCarthy's creation and the internal textual details,this thesis aims to reveal Blood Meridian's theme as a more humanistic concern over the individual's condition at the end of the twentieth century instead of a simple deconstruction of the American myth or a passive manifestation of moral nihilism.It is argued that through multiple images,recurring spectacles,and impressive symbols,Blood Meridian is able to construct a narrative system about the quest for the individual's spiritual survival at century's end.In brief,taking the perspective of Nietzsche's life ethics,this thesis offers a detailed textual analysis of multiple anti-traditional images,recurring celestial,ecological and historical landscapes,and important life-related symbols with a view to trace the process of the disillusion of rationalism,the construction of irrational living conditions,and the emancipation of potentials of the individual's life in Blood Meridian.It draws the conclusion that Blood Meridian embodies McCarthy's deep concerns over the individual's condition at century's end as well as his active exploration of the meaning of life as an eternal philosophical question.When confronted with the prevalent pessimism at century's end,the individual is encouraged to divorce from the illusion of rationality and stimulate the vitality in both body and spirit in order to overcome the nihilism and achieve spiritual survival and transcendence.