"But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didn't say so" (372).

This quote embodied Cormac McCarthy's fourth novel and personified the main character, Cornelius Suttree, who traveled through the wasteland of the Tennessee River valley as a fisher of men.

Scholarship:

D. S. Butterworth's Scholarly Essay on Suttree

In Pearls As Swine: Recentering the Marginal in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree D. S. Butterworth argued that McCarthy treated the condemned characters of the Knoxville outcasts as geological and archaeological finds. According to Butterworth, McCarthy's characters were spirits who by happenstance temporarily inhabit a body. Individuals were characterized by the futility of their actions each going about their daily tasks but never actually achieving anything. Consider the scene of the Reese family who spent countless hours on the Tennessee River farming for worthless Tennessee River pearls. Just as Butterworth pointed...