SOURCE: Sepich, John Emil. “The Dance of History in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Southern Literary Journal 24, no. 1 (fall 1991): 16-31.

In the following essay, Sepich reviews the potential causes for Judge Holden's murder of the unnamed character “the kid,” through an examination of historical sources, as well as through an exploration of the moral universe as it exists in the novel.

Blood Meridian's odyssey, begun in a Tennessee cabin in 1833, comes to a close when the novel's unnamed protagonist, “the kid,” meets death in an outhouse in Griffin, Texas, in 1878 at the hands of a former compatriot named Judge Holden. But the murder seems to occur without intelligible motive. The kid and Holden had ridden together years before in John Glanton's gang of professional scalp-hunters in Mexico and the American southwest.¹ Shortly before the killing, Holden has remarked that the kid was a traitor to Glanton's band and...