Reviews for Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels

The average rating for Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-26 00:00:00 Mark Dziaba Caveat: I've only read the Blood Meridian bits and the conclusion. Owens argues that this novel is primarily about violence; that violence is deep in the DNA of people and that we should realize it's just unavoidable. Confusingly, he also seems to think violence is a bad thing and that we shouldn't be so violent. Like everyone who's attracted to determinist arguments, he likes being all hard-arse and not falling for soppy humanist cliches about free will, and also can't go all the way through to the end with his determinism. Which suggests to me that if it was considered hard-arse to believe in free will, he'd believe in it. In any case, aside from the impossibility of actually believing in a deterministic world, his argument is decent. He is occasionally misleading when dealing with the Judge, which you have to be if you think the narrator agrees with him that humans are naturally, atavistically violent and there's no order in the world. But Owens' is an honest reader and the problems with his argument aren't flaws in his work; they're flaws in the argument itself. That they're so easy to spot [why is the judge so intent on 'knowing' things if the goal is simply survival of the fittest? how can you consistently claim both a) order is not set aside because of our ignorance; and b) any order in the world is put there by us?] is a tribute to his honesty, makes him a very readable critic, and is a sure sign that he's wrong. It's pretty obvious to me that the Judge is treated ironically by the narrator, and that violence isn't the 'theme' of the novel, let alone its thesis: the problem the novel points to is positivism: the idea that what exists determines what will, and what ought to, exist.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-19 00:00:00 Raymond Lee Insightful, eye-opening critique of my favorite living writer.