The Last Pale Light in The West

As I reread Blood Meridian, I am reminded of McCarthy's other works and the interconnectedness that we as careful readers find between them. We've spent some time in class discussing the book's the enigmatic epilogue and recently, having finished The Road for a second time, I have been thinking about this last portion of the novel in the context of McCarthy's body of work (or at least the three novels that I have read). What I find in common between The Road, No Country For Old Men and Blood Meridian is the recurring image of the fire or the flame that is being carried or set. In The Road, the man and the boy seem to be carrying the fire of humanity in a post-apocalyptic world. Sheriff Bell in No Country For Old Men meets his father in a dream, carrying the fire on up ahead. And now, in Blood Meridian, a nameless man progresses over the plains, striking fires enkindled within the shallow ground. As we look for meaning within this, we, or maybe I should say I, inevitably look to these later works to somehow lend some meaning to this mystery. In the other two works the fire appears to represent humanity in a way (I say humanity in the sense of being humane, which we all know you can be human without being humane). The protagonists in The Road and No Country For Old Men seem to be moral, or upright men who believe in the goodness of mankind, but yet are confronted with the horror of what man can do to his fellow man. The hope that they find seems to be in family, particulary paternal, relationships. In The Road, it's the relationship between the man and the boy, and in No Country For Old Men, it's between Sheriff Bell and his father. So what does this have to do with Blood Meridian? The Kid is set adrift in life and like many of the characters in the novel has no family or can never return to his family. This raises the possibility that the Kid's own moral depravity is owed to his near orphan status, as he has run away from his drunken father, though ultimately I am unsatisfied with that explanation. I think the Kid, instead of grappling with other people's evil actions, as in the other two novels, is forced to deal with his own crimes against humanity. I think this provides the reason for the necklace of ears he wears around his neck, not as a trophy, but like the Ancient Mariner's albatross, as a reminder of his own depravity. And then we have the fires being struck across the plain. I think, if we go with the way fire is represented in the other two novels, that the fire represents humanity. It's bright and lights up the night sky, but then, burning out when most satisfied, is smoldered under the impenetrable darkness that surrounds.