Saturday, February 19, 2011
End of Blood Meridian
I realize that some of you might have some continuing questions/grievances/insights concerning Blood Meridian, especially its enigmatic ending at the jakes. I'll open up this post for your thoughts and discussions concerning the ending of Blood Meridian, interpretations, and the digested read version of the book that I had you listen to.
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I'm sorry if this isn't much of a comment but I was very, very confused by the ending of Blood Meridian. I'm not really sure I even know what happened. The ending really makes me wonder how old the Judge is/was. The book makes no mention of him appearing or acting older even though a considerable amount of time has passed since the Glanton gang's end and the ending of Blood Meridian.
ReplyDeleteI think it is totally reasonable to be confused by the ending. I'll give a basic summary for discussion's sake: After seeing Toadvine hanged, the kid wanders for, say, 30 years or so, and meets Holden at a bar. They have a conversation comparing war to dance wherein the Judge seems ominous and the kid has a kind of forced and fearful bravado. Then the kid sees the naked judge at the "jakes" wherein Holden gives the kid some kind of hug. What happens next is anyone's guess as McCarthy only deems to give us the reaction of the witnesses for the first time in the novel. They are appalled.
ReplyDeleteThe most common argument is that the Judge kills the kid in some gruesome way which is either 1) more gruesome than all of the violence so far or 2) not more or less gruesome but cannot be described because of our relationship to the kid or for another reason. At least one critic has argued that the Judge is busy sodomizing the kid, which he had wanted all along. What's y'all's take?
The "jakes" is an outhouse. It's an embrace of death as he rapes and kills the kid, now the man.
DeleteThe omnipresence and the invincibility of the judge in the book makes a strong case that that narration of the story is not completely reliable. It's almost like a story told through a haze of delirium on the Kid's deathbed or something similar to that. I agree with the comments about the ending though. It's so bewildering that I still feel confused even though I've reread the portion of the story when he gets to Griffin
ReplyDeleteI believe that the invincibility(and mad dancing skills) of the judge at the enigmatic end of the novel hint that the Judge is something more then a character meant to be taken literally. Almost like a Wild West Tyler Durden, not necessarily an alternate personality, but some anthropomorphic projection of violent ideals and beliefs meant to lead these broken men.
ReplyDeleteI'm kind of lost on the what happens to the kid in the ending, but am leaning towards thinking that McCarthy left it out because it's "pointless". Just more violence for the sake of violence that is inevitable in a world where "war is God"
I agree with critic Patrick W. Shaw that the Judge did in fact sodomize the kid. If you think about it, if Holden wanted only to kill the kid, why was he naked? Shaw points out that the novel had several times earlier established "a sequence of events that gives us ample information to visualize how Holden molests a child, then silences him with aggression." It is the personal humiliation of the kid that impacts the reader so much (this is why someone in the book finally reacts so profoundly to an act of violence). Shaw gives a really good argument for why he believes the ending is such, and I've copy and pasted it below:
ReplyDeleteWhen the judge assaults the kid in the Fort Griffin jakes… he betrays a complex of psychological, historical and sexual values of which the kid has no conscious awareness, but which are distinctly conveyed to the reader. Ultimately, it is the kid's personal humiliation which impacts the reader most tellingly. In the virile warrior culture which dominates that text and to which the reader has become acclimated, seduction into public homoeroticism is a dreadful fate. We do not see behind the outhouse door to know the details of the kid's corruption. It may be as simple as the embrace that we do witness or as violent as the sodomy implied by the judge's killing of the Indian children. The kid's powerful survival instinct perhaps suggests that he is a more willing participant than a victim. However, the degree of debasement and the extent of the kid's willingness are incidental. The public revelation of the act is what matters. Other men have observed the kid's humiliation… In such a male culture, public homoeroticism is untenable and it is this sudden revelation that horrifies the observers at Fort Griffin. No other act could offend their masculine sensibilities as the shock they display… This triumph over the kid is what the exhibitionist and homoerotic judge celebrates by dancing naked atop the wall, just as he did after assaulting the half-breed boy.
—Patrick W. Shaw, "The Kid's Fate, the Judge's Guilt"
I wonder. Is it possible to mistake ambiguity and strangeness and a weak ending for sophistication? Various proclamations from the Judge seemed overwrought. The temptation is to think that these "insights" are meaningful and powerful because they're often difficult to understand. They don't have to be.
ReplyDeleteI've obviously come very late to the conversation but while I was researching the ending to resolve my own confusion I came across a comment on another site suggesting that what was in the jakes was the missing girl from the dancing bear act probably rapes and brutalized in a gruesome way. That was like an epiphany for me. It made a lot of sense. The only question then would be was it the Kid or the Judge who did it. Maybe both? It also suggested that the stranger pissing outside the jakes was actually the kid, which made sense to me too. I don't buy the sodomizing the kid theory because the kid just came from being with the whore, although it is implied that the kid was impotent. But her being a midget and his acceptance of that suggests the kid could be a pedophile. Maybe the kid encounters the judge abusing the girl and partakes. There are many other scenes that imply the judge is sexually abusing children and maybe the kid is doing so as well.
ReplyDeleteDespite really liking that suggestion I am also bouncing around in my head the idea that the judge only existed in his first appearance (when he accuses the preacher of having sex with goats). And from there he is just a persona of evil or the devil of some sort. The historical book which supposedly told the real life story of the Glanton gang included a description of the judge, but critics and analysis suggestion not only was the story unreliable but that it was unlikely that the judge character really existed. Perhaps mcCarthy took that element as inspiration and added a character that wasn't really there.
I was expecting a much more straightforward ending but now that it has tossed in my head for nearly an hour I have to say I'm glad it ended as it did.
no idea what happened in the jakes...judge kills kid to put to rest the last witness ...cormac cloaks the end in darkness ,there is no insight tnside endless darkness
ReplyDeletejust finished it and my first thought was the kid was raped by the judge
ReplyDeleteMcCarthy has been generous enough to give us different hints and clues that can be put together in many ways. There's no obvious single ending, it is so very open one can spend hours speculating what could have happened.
ReplyDeleteCompletely different way of thinking about it. The kid is the judge at the end. Or in other words the judge doesnt exist at the end From the moment the kid is in jail and the judge talks to him the kid realizes that he is evil. He wanders around in the desert or wherever for 30 years and snaps. He snapped when he killed he young boy. Then he immediately runs into the judge. He tells the judge "you ain't nothin" and the judge says you don't know how right you are. The judge doesn't exist. The kid is the judge. The missing girl is in the outhouse.
ReplyDeleteOk that was an interesting take and you may have changed my perspective. I just finished it and yes I think the kid was rapped. The judge held dominion over all he encountered with his book and the comments he made about war his role in war and how war god and man are a trinity. He IMO has been waiting to rape or take dominance on the kid for years but he was protected figuratively by the other men in the party. In the mean time brown children will do. The boy in the stables where they all met the other pilgrims was thrown in the pit after Holden rapes him. The small Indian boy that was kept in a pet like manner and sat on Holden's knee was also rapped and killed by him. The Mexican girl gone missing also. These are hidden events but in the later chapters his pedophilia becomes blatant. When they are settled by the ferry the judge has a 12 year old girl tied up and naked in the camp . It is not expletive. The writing that it is him but based on previous events we know it is. It is not Mccarthys style to be expletive with the characters regardless of how descriptive he is with gore and scenes of violence. Also, he kept the mentally handicapped child in the same manner it is implied that he either raped him or had him rape the slave child or both in the scene where the yumas find them in the hut. His evil is only limited by your imagination. Also he continues to keep the "idiot" for further use.
DeleteI can't see sodomy as the ultimate horror to the folks in the story and do not feel Mc Carthy presents it in that light elsewhere in the novel. While the partisans and others practise it , is not their goal, just a pastime as is the pointless violence at times. Some killing is for cash, some for survival, some for show, some for the "brotherhood", some to try out a weapon. Similarly sexuality is presented in many forms, many dysfunctional, but some just like eating which also is a physical act represented horrifically in the novel. I think the Judge does whatever he wants whenever he wants but shows, despite his enormous ego, a real delight in mastery of knowledge and skills from ammunition manufacture to dancing. But tellingly, he likes to destroy things that he has the knowledge of, as when he destroyed the archeaological finds after he had drawn them. It seems that once his delight in knowledge is satiated and his superior status in the order of things re-established, he delights in destroying that which he has "known". In this light, it would not surprise me if Holden ate the now mature Kid. After all, what can the Kid have to gain from further living, while Holden can continue to consume, destroy and celebrate in the dance? The Judge( a consciousness of reviewing all as is and deeming it a mixture of wonderful and for his delectation and status, and/or pathetic, inferior, irrelevant) is an aspect of mankind yet to be wrangled with, unless the Judge is an American representation of the Greek idea of Hubrous, which as a perspective on American history cannot be re-written. We cannot change the past. Mc Carthy shows we cannot rid the world of Holden. Or does he? Does he alert us to the eternal grapple with ourselves to be more human and less animal, more connected to others and less self centred? There are many images and events in the novel which show intense will to survive as well as casual disposal of life. I think the Judge's triumphal dance is provocative and challenging; we think," Kill him" and so he wins.
ReplyDeleteThe latch was shut. What those two men walked into and saw was the aftermath, after the latch was unlatched and all living occupants left. The sodomizing argument seems reactionary to me. Just because one critic wrote in and had it posted on Wikipedia does not make it true.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree. I caught that too that Holden closed the latch. So indeed what the men witnessed was the aftermath. I thought Holden must have killed the boy in some disturbing fasion. Perhaps even consuming part of him. I think the end is brilliant.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteVery much so, and I think most people who proclaim this book as genius (along with other CM work) have done just that. I've never seen any author campaigning so hard for a Nobel prize in his writing. 'Obscure' is not 'deep.' BM is the Book of Revelations in modern literature: I don't know what this guy is going on about, but it's obscure - We'd better stick it in the Bible.
BM vascillates between gorgeous, but repetitive prose and stilted, pointless pontification. 99% of the 'meaning' that has been hung on it comes from the confusion it engenders in readers; not from the prose itself. The Judge is the naked truth, fate, the embodiment of war. If the kid was finally subsumed in evil, it was against his will. So what? So shall we all go? So went the West? This is the fall of man? Take every 3rd word out of an Agatha Christie novel and you can get the same result.
They rode on.
The above comment should have included the citation from an earlier post:
ReplyDeleteIs it possible to mistake ambiguity and strangeness and a weak ending for sophistication?
Simply sodomizing and/or killing The Kid is not what The Judge wants from the The Kid, no matter the brutality of either. I don't think The Judge is at all concerned that there is a living witness to his long past days as part of the Glanton Gang. What the Judge wants most is to convert The Kid. He wants to extinguish The Kid's "mutinous" nature against his reign of evil. He wants to root-out that part of the The Kid’s soul that would reserve “clemency for the heathen.” The Judge wants to mend the "flawed place in the fabric" of The Kid's heart that still holds some degree of honor.
ReplyDeleteIn the final pages of the book, the little girl playing the barrel organ goes missing, and shortly thereafter The Kid has a failed sexual experience with a whore. From the whorehouse, The Kid walks straight to the jake that Holden is in because he knows which jake Holden is in with the little organ girl. That is why Holden is nude and he exhaults in seeing The Kid - The Kid is there to partake in the molestation. The Judge leaves the jake to dance triumphantly in his conversion.
The man urinating in the mud warns the other man about entering that jake because he has either heard something coming from that jake that would cause him to do so, or he already looked in the jake and knew of its horror. If it is the former, The Kid is exposed in the act of the molestation and the man who opened the door can only say "Good God almighty". If it is the latter (and more likely), The Kid and the little organ girl are dead and left in a gruesome and compromising position, and the man who opened the door can only say "Good God almighty". Either way, The Kid is exposed in his conversion; just as Holden would have it.
Perhaps both The Kid and the little organ girl were molested and killed by Holden. That may seem inconsistent with my opening thought, but it is not. Molesting and/or killing The Kid are both options for Holden, but only after what he perceives to The Kid’s conversion; only once he believes The Kid is no better a person than him.
I think the Judge must have killed him in the Jakes by rape because in the conversation beforehand, the Judge claims that his heart was never into all the Glanton Gang was doing. He participated, but he never quite believed in it. Judge's argument, which he proves in the Jakes, is that he must take all the violence and gore as part of himself to be one close to God as the Judge is, a full acceptance of all blood life offers. Since the kid never committed to it, he must be brought to its door to atone for his half-heartedness in his career choice.
ReplyDeleteThe Judge is Satan walking the earth and he will never die. I don't think sodomy was the unspeakable evil the men witnessed in the jakes; that seems mild compared to other acts of violence in the book. I think the Judge murdered the kid (the "man" at the end) in a particularly gruesome fashion, such as by ripping his heart out of his chest, even consuming it.
ReplyDeleteis it possible that only the young girl is dead after an encounter with 'the kid' and the judge. leaving one in total victory the other utter full of self loathing.
ReplyDeleteWhy are people talking about cannibalism? The Judge wasn't real. It's the kid the whole time, until the dancing bear gets shot. Only one can dance.
ReplyDeleteThe kid probably did go nuts in the wilderness but how much was or could have been delirium? When the Judge visits the kid in the prison it was him telling the kid what actually happened. The Judge is still there though talking to the kid.