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“We Languish in Obscurity”: The Silence of God as Atavistic Calvinism in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction
- Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal
- Penn State University Press
- Volume 97, Number 3, 2014
- pp. 265-296
- Article
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God’s silence and hiddenness constitute a recurring theme in the works of American novelist Cormac McCarthy, and while this feature of his fiction can at one level be appreciated by considering McCarthy’s fiction alongside late-modern literary giants like Melville and Dostoevsky—who dealt often with similar themes—I argue in this essay that McCarthy’s God might be more fully understood when considered as falling on (and furthering) a trajectory inaugurated by sixteenth-century Protestant theologian John Calvin.