Suttree is a larger, funnier, more ambitious, more personal book than the three McCarthy novels published before it, but it does include some of the same types of outcast characters that appeared in the earlier novels.

Jimmy Blevins as described in Part I of All the Pretty Horses (1992) seems to have been cast from the same mold as Gene Harrogate. Both are pitiable but comic troublemakers who test the compassion and loyalty of their companions to their very limits.