The Dethronement Of Human Subjects In Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian In Postmodern Context

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian leads the de-anthropocentric echelon of the 20~thh century American literature with the notorious nonchalance towards human moral consciousness.Denying itself and readers the solace of any form,the blood-drenched story confronts human demise with eerie unresponsiveness and unperturbed irony.The precipitous reduction of human agency to a transient,accidental,extemporized,ineffectual,and farcical phenomenon excitingly congregates with the anti-humanist ethos of postmodernism,arguably the most ferocious so far among the philosophical discourses targeted at the invention of human subjectivity since Enlightenment.This thesis launches an inquiry into the novel's calamitous attack at the misconceived centrality surrounding human species,and tries to establish the linkage between the egoistic syndrome that the characters are afflicted with and the United States today infamously reputed for racial division and unsolicited intervention beyond American soil.And still more extensively,the thesis strives to decipher the message addressed to the entirety of science-armed modern man that has been self-aggrandized enough to covet the subjugation of Nature.The thesis reveals the repertoire at McCarthy's disposal that is devoted to demolishing the myth surrounding the potency and continuity of human subjects.Readers are obliged to reconcile with a narrator that is little interested in giving an informative,organized,and intellectually profound account,boldly challenges the control,sensibility and initiative traditionally awarded to an omnipotent narrator;meanwhile,they found themselves repeatedly embarrassed by the mockery made by the reticent narrator of reader subjects'attempt at thematization driven by the urge to know and grasp.The characters in the story shed the distinction of identity,drifting their way through the broad-canvassed peregrination generally nameless,featureless,moodless,and apparition-like,with a minimized dab of introspective consciousness.No hero emerges and no death is accorded with a touch of tragedy that might help eulogize the daring victimhood to fate,or provoke a mournful pang of empathy.All-consuming violence strikes out in its own right to whose eternity the human ephemerality must pay obeisance and claims no undue attention or pity.Apart from brutish degradation of human significance,there has been efforts to invalidate the gains of the history of civilization by exposing man as fundamentally barbarous,riotous,violent,and uncultivated,as evidenced by his striking resemblance to animals,retarded use of language for any interlocutory effect,etc.While human subjects fade out of focus,the vast natural landscape begins to have its immanent force felt and feared.Its merciless vitality and universal administration pinch man and animals alike fixated at the receiving end of sufferings that is for Nature to dispense at will.Man's lamentable wishful thinking to try to incorporate Nature into his imagination and decision has ramification within human society itself where the dominant group cannot afford the risk of co-existing with other social beings whose experiences,meanings,and values cannot be substantially verified,and thus recognized in terms of the dominant ideologies.Hence,internecine antagonism and havocs ensue where men victimize men,and women as well.Harassed on both flanks by indomitable environment and self-imposed internal warfare,man is jolted out of the hallucination of being self-directed and self-willed,and must resign himself to the compromised freedom of choice.With reference to the current political and cultural landscape,Blood Meridian must have encomia for giving man a heads-up before he is too self-engaged and self-debilitated to raise the clear and earnest questions of his relationship with objects,the other,and himself.A prophetic piece of message has been sent both to the America where rampages white supremacy in the spirit of Manifest Destiny that is still wild in the air,and to the mankind as a whole who must mend his way of pressuring Nature into servitude.