Xander Tyska explores allusions to Vergil in Cormac McCarthy’s work as a reflection upon the moral ambiguity of “culture-heroes” and the very act of discovery.
The late Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 Blood Meridian: Or, The Evening Redness in the West is one of the most powerful and horrifying works of American literature. The novel describes the violent progress of an unnamed protagonist known as “the kid” as he engages in the slaughter of the indigenous people of the American Southwest of 1848–50 with a gang of genocidal “scalp-hunters” led by John Joel Glanton. Not for the faint of heart, Blood Meridian is a searing indictment of the bloody consequences of European colonialism in the United States and Mexico.