As the story drags on through the desert, the reader's sense of time and space becomes distorted, anchored only by chapter titles and character names. McCarthy characterizes the West as one gigantic battlefield, blending bands of outlaws, Mexican citizens and soldiers, and scattered tribes of Native Americans together into a self-destructive mass of cannibalistic violence. In an example of a cycle of violence, the Mexican government pays the Glanton Gang to bring back the scalps of Native Americans who attack Mexican settlements, the outlaws take scalps from both Mexican and Native American victims, Mexican soldiers are sent to eliminate the outlaws, and so on. In other war stories, there might be reprieves from violence or a resolution that brings peace--Blood Meridian offers no break. It's brutal, because history is brutal.
McCarthy's motivation to debunk nostalgia for the American West has much to do with how history is taught and created within modern American society. As George Orwell writes in 1984, "He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past"--and this reasoning applies directly to the function of literature within pop culture. Fiction has an uncanny power to expose the truth behind myths and illusions, and in writing Blood Meridian, McCarthy may have hoped that readers would understand the American exceptionalist spirit justifying the country's numerous wars and ugly past as a plague rather than patriotism. Like the Kid, those who were forced to serve in Vietnam, Korea, and during the Cold War were born into a society obsessed with the military-industrial complex that had rarely turned a critical eye to imperialism. The Judge is America, he is war, he is eternal, that is, if America remains an exceptionalist's fiction.
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