SOURCE: Pitts, Jonathan. “Writing On: Blood Meridian as Devisionary Western.” Western American Literature 33, no. 1 (spring 1998): 7-25.

In the following essay, Pitts argues that Blood Meridian's encompassing of historical, cultural, and literary styles enhances its ability to serve as a parable for the American vision of life.

We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer.

—Emerson, “The Poet”

The nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an American genius.

—Emerson, “The Young American”

For the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy...