How Does Mccarthy Present The Use Of Violence In Blood Meridian By Cormac Mccarthy?

In “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien presents a different perspective on what war is really about, along with the burdens constantly borne by soldiers. Through his use of flashbacks, imagery, and pathos, O’Brien shows just how the life of a soldier is much more than war and violence, but combating the burdens of life that soldiers carry with them.

     The Things They Carried showed that life was miserable and that men were not killing for some great glory or honor. Just like George Orwell the men were killing for a different purpose. The men in the Things They Carried were killing to because they were embarrassed not to. In fact the narrator says, “Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what has bought them to war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They killed as to not die of embarrassment…Rather they were too frightened to be cowards.”(O’Brien 1491) This is exactly why Orwell had shot and killed the elephant. George Orwell was so scared of what people may think of him, that is why he shot the elephant. George didn’t want to be called a coward or even

In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy describes a lawless and godless group of men ordained to cleanse the West of lesser people. This group wanders through the West leaving a trail of slaughtered people in their trail. The emptiness and ruthlessness of their hearts is reflected in the harsh and unforgiving landscape. McCarthy uses reoccurring themes of war, religion, and dance to paint a graphic picture of the savageness of life in the West.

“I done a bad thing. I done another bad thing (91).” In the novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck these “bad things” happen continuously. Do each of these instants prove that Lennie is violent? In this novel, Lennie is not a violent person because he doesn’t have mental stability, he doesn’t realize his strength, and he has never shown intentional violence.

The main recurring theme in Flannery O’Connor’s stories is the use of violence towards characters in order to give them an eye-opening moment in which they finally realize their true self in relation to the rest of society and openly accept insight into how they should act or think. This theme of violence can clearly be seen in three works by Flannery O’Connor: A Good Man is Hard to Find, Good Country People, and Everything That Rises Must Converge.

At the same time, O’Brien struggles with destructiveness of the conflicting images of violence and peace in death through the juxtaposition of the imagery of the dead man. While “his one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole.” The dead man has one shut eye that resembles a peaceful sleep, while the other side is obliterated by the grenade into a star-shaped hole. The image of the star-shaped hole in the dead soldier’s eye represents the hopes that he once had when he was alive: “He hoped the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, always” (119). Furthermore, “his right cheek was smooth and hairless,” an image of untouched innocence that contrasts with his left cheek, which was “peeled back in three ragged strips,” destroyed by the violence O’Brien inflicts upon it. The juxtaposition of the butterfly that settles on his chin and the fatal wound on his neck, “open to the spinal cord…blood…thick and shiny” illustrate the complexity and ambiguity of the unnaturalness of war, depicted by the image of the dead man’s wrung neck, contrasted with the ironic peace and naturalism of death in the image of the fragile butterfly. These select images are also those that O’Brien chooses to fixate upon and develop throughout the chapter as he struggles to comprehend the moral implications of his actions. The innocence of the “slim, dead, almost dainty young man” is further reinforced when O’Brien describes his wrists as “wrists of a

The connotation of violence is what is making the combinations unusual. Although there were also some evidence of alliteration and incongruity, the importance of the connotation of violence amounts to more than the other two. For example, the phrase “paws used as though they are medical instruments,”(84) demonstrates the connotation. Medical instruments are usually clean and well maintained, while a paw is dirty and rough. That creates an image of a gruesome procedure of an animal mauling a person and violently tearing he or she apart. By comparing it to something very different yet somewhat similar at the same time, Capote is displaying how violent something truly is. The unusual combinations come from those comparisons.

McCarthy’s novel, Blood Meridian, is an interesting story about a boy who grows up in the chaos of the world, but unlike most authors, McCarthy, creates a more complete image of humanity. McCarthy includes violence and barbarism as a natural part of who we are as humans. The protagonist, the kid, grew up with a father who was a drunken teacher who did not care for him or teach him how to read or write. The kid was not taken care of, wasn’t shown love, and wasn’t given love; therefore he did not know how to care or what being taken care of was. In the very first pages of the novel, McCarthy constructs a violent image of the kid by stating, “… in him broods already a taste for violence” (McCarthy 3). McCarthy uses this quote as a starting point

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’brien describes his perspective on how he came to be in the war and his view on how people behaved towards death. O’brien published the book 20 years after the war to show the events that O’brien had gone through in the war. Tim O’Brien has portrayed acceptance of death in order to show how the characters reacted to the deaths that surround them in The Things They Carried.

In the novel, The Things They Carried, the war stories of the characters are nothing like the glamour-filled heroic tales. Men had enlisted in the Vietnam war in honor of serving their country despite the uncertain outcomes. The silent truths of the war remain hidden until resurfaced through trauma. The narrator, Tim O’Brien shows the readers how the results of war can be unsettling and scar the soldiers forever. Though the soldiers have survived physically, mentally they are dead. Every time a death takes place in the story, guilt takes over the soldiers rational thoughts. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien clarifies the misconceptions of war being honorable to portray the truth of the Vietnam War and how it has psychologically self-destructive

Growing up as a teen in the twenty-first century society is much more challenging than it was centuries before. Today's society presents high school teens with much more challenging issues and negative influences. In some cases, the rate of violence, racism, brutality, and substance abuse has increased and consumes teens more than in the past. High school teens face these prevalent issues daily in literature, media, and through personal experiences. A piece of literature that embodies all of these issues is the novel, In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. Although, the novel In Cold Blood discusses many controversial issues, the inclusion of this novel in a high school setting would allow for the discussion of controversial and brutal topics in a structured environment.

For example, “that lake of burning brimstone is extended abroad under you.” This shows that Hell is a burning fire underneath them. Mr. Edwards tells them that their guilt and wrath are treasuring up each day. For instance, “If god should only withdraw his hand from the flood gate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery floods of fierceness and wrath of God, would rush with unconceivable fury.” Showing them how God is extremely angry with them because of their wrongdoings and how his wrath will instantly overcome them.

“Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West,” is a novel written by an author by the name of Cormac McCarthy. Cormac McCarthy wrote this to show a teenage runaway perspective of living on your own during the late 1800’s. Throughout this novel, McCarthy shows the reader the feeling of being in hell and describing a kid’s journey through hell. This eye-opening novel takes place in Texas, Mexico and the American Southwest, Circa. This historical fiction novel is surprisingly accurate when describing the events that occurred during the situations in the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico around the 1850’s. McCarthy’s Blood Meridian contains a lot of violent and bloody events that build up to the subjugation of the Apaches, as well as other Native tribes, and the southwestern expansion of the United States of America. All these events are proven to be an accurate description of the way Indigenous people were treated and how they lived throughout this time.

The name of this book written by Cormac McCarthy, the Road, can always drive the readers into a misunderstanding that it is a Road style work. However, it is actually a apocalyptic story which includes bunch of description and discussion about belief, morality and the human nature. It actually presents how people will act under a extreme terrible situation when the civilization totally does not exist. Actually McCarthy is not the only one who uses a lawless environment to analysis the humanity. Lord of the Flies by William Golding is also a story which puts the characters in a raw environment and presents their action. These two works have the similarities in the way they set up the stories, the type of conflicts and the way they end the stories; and this similarities actually show how the things described in the stories are commonly deemed, and help the two stories to support each other’s ideas.

According to the first section of the poem, a bundle of Hollow Men are inclining together like scarecrows. Every little thing about them is as dry as the Sahara Desert, including their voices and their bodies. All that they say and do is mindless. They exist in a state like Hell, aside from they were excessively bashful and weak, making it impossible to confer the brutal demonstrations that would have picked up them access to Hell. They have not crossed the River Styx to make it to either Heaven or Hell. The general population who have traversed recollect these folks as "Hallow men."