Cormac McCarthy's Violent Destinies

The Poetics of Determinism and Fatalism

Brad Bannon, John Vanderheide, Brad Bannon, John Vanderheide

• Publisher: Univ Tennessee Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781621903826
• eBook ISBN: 9781621904168
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the release of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965, Cormac McCarthy's characters, intricate plots, and sometimes forbidding settings have captivated the attention of countless readers while exploring deep philosophical problems, including that of human agency and free will. This multiauthor volume places the full range of his novels in historical, literary, and cultural contexts and shifts the focus of critical engagement to questions of determinism, fatalism, and free will. Essayists over the course of eleven chapters show how McCarthy's protagonists and antagonists often confront grotesque realities and destinies, and find themselves prey to incessant subconscious and uncontrollable forces. In the process, these scholars reveal that McCarthy's works arrive thoroughly tinctured with religious complexities, ambiguities of ancient and modern thinking, and profoundly splintered notions of morality, freedom, and ethics. Consequently, McCarthy's philosophical depth, mastery of language, and sometimes shocking psychological analysis are brought into sharp focus for longtime readers. With new scholarship from eminent critics, an accessible style, and precise attention to the lesser-known works, Cormac McCarthy's Violent Destinies re-introduces the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist's work under the twin themes of fatalism and determinism. 

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword by Rick Wallach
• Introduction by Brad Bannon and John Vanderheide
• Chapter 1: Romance and Naturalism in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses
• Chapter 2: “All Things Fought”: Fate, Violence, and the Illusion of a Lockean Social Contract in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God
• Chapter 3: God, Evil, Suffering, and Human Destiny in the Border Trilogy: Learning from the “Teachers”
• Chapter 4: Guns and Material Determinism in The Road
• Chapter 5: Holden and Chigurh: Cormac McCarthy and the Ethics of Power
• Chapter 6: Mysteries of the Meridian Revealed: McCarthy’s Anachronistic Tarot
• Chapter 7: Doom’s Adumbration: Suttree and the Problem of Fatalism
• Chapter 8: “A Clamorous Tide of Unforeseen Consequence”: Heimarmene in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy
• Chapter 9: Fatal Loss and Technological Blindness in McCarthy’s Tennessee Novels
• Chapter 10: Freaking Determinism: The Image of the Wild Man in Blood Meridian
• Chapter 11: “Archives of Our Own Devising”: Structural Fatality in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West
• Contributors
• Index