SOURCE: Donoghue, Denis. “Reading Blood Meridian.” Sewanee Review 105, no. 3 (summer 1997): 401-18.

In the following essay, Donoghue presents several possible readings of Blood Meridian as he outlines several key themes, among them McCarthy's muted narrative response to endless violence and the relationship between Judge Holden and “the kid.”

A year or two ago at New York University I taught a graduate course called Aesthetics and Aesthetic Ideology. The main aim I set myself was to examine the impingement of political, social, and moral considerations on certain works of literature. I did not conceal from myself or from the students the fact that I wished to maintain the aesthetic and formal character of literature and that I was dismayed by current attempts to reduce literature to a set of ideological conclusions. Many of those conclusions were biographical rigmaroles. Yeats and Pound were Fascists. Eliot was anti-Semitic. Wyndham Lewis was a...