American Literature / Unit 18 AML 1732 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Cormac McCarthy and *Blood Meridian*
Captions available
The idea
The witness describes a novel driven not by plot but by sensation, whose readers call it nightmarish and note that mundane passages give way abruptly to slaughter. Its central figure is a judge, and its ending is deliberately ambiguous. The prose concentrates on the material of the world.
In practice
A nightmare with a deliberately weak plot.
Where people slip
The violence is sustained and deliberate.
Your place on the trail
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