Cormac McCarthy, whose early novels were often set in eastern Tennessee and whose later work focuses on the American Southwest, is frequently compared with such Southern-based writers as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. In a Dic...

IN THE RICHLY ALLUSIVE NOVEL SUTTREE, CORMAC MCCARTHY BORROWS structural devices from Irish tales of the high kings to give shape and meaning to Buddy Suttree's wanderings. Some of the allusions in Suttree extend back through The Waste Land to Odysseus, to the...

While all of Cormac McCarthy's fiction is recondite, most of his characters are primitives who, in high contrast to their maker, have only a rudimentary facility with language. Their ponderous and slack attention, located somewhere between animal sentience and flail human engagement in...

In the following essay, Shelton comments upon the existential themes within Suttree, and focuses on the protagonist of the same name. Shelton provides an overview of the novel, and discusses the Myth of Sisyphus, suicide, and other topics in his treatment.

In the following article, Longley Jr. provides an examination of the novel Suttree, discusses McCarthy's writing style, and comments on McCarthy's place in the literary world.

In the following excerpt, Crace discusses categorizing Suttree as a "tribal" work, and faults the novel for lacking an "overall social and allegorical context."

Critical analysis and review of Sutree by Cormac McCarthy including major themes, significance in title, symbolism, setting, and comparison to other novels. Essay also includes an analysis of D.S. Butterworth's scholarly article Pearls as Swine: Recentering the Marginal in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree.