SOURCE: Schopen, Bernard A. “‘They Rode On’: Blood Meridian and the Art of Narrative.” Western American Literature 30, no. 2 (summer 1995): 179-94.

In the following essay, Schopen studies McCarthy's complexly integrated narrative structures in Blood Meridian, deeming that these elements fuse together to form a truthful assessment of the nature of humanity.

Since its publication in 1985, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West has received little serious criticism. This remarkable neglect of what Denis Donoghue calls “one of the most powerful American novels I have read” (6) is about to end, however. Now that All The Pretty Horses has garnered a National Book Award and The Crossing leaped up the best-seller list, McCarthy threatens to become an academically fashionable, perhaps even a canonical figure, and we can expect that his novels will increasingly be “interrogated” into confessing that they are cultural documents desperately in need of “post-something...