Everything’s Interesting: Cormac McCarthy and the Social Construction of Reality

Cormac McCarthy’s writing features perspectives on the human condition strikingly comparable in range and substance with those advanced in The Social Construction of Reality, the classic treatise in the sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. At the focus of their shared interests is the human struggle to erect shields against the encroachment of disorder, a universal recoil from the threat of anomie embodied most forcefully in the dark mystery of death. McCarthy’s early novels (The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree) foreground settings in which ordered social formations are severely limited; Blood Meridian gives attention to the influence of forceful constructions of reality in marginal situations; in the border trilogy, romantic social constructions (myths) succumb to harsh actualities; No Country for Old Men offers a window on the perils that await those whose constructions of reality blind them to the forces of chance and death; and The Road dramatizes the attempt to reconstruct a viable social reality in a world reduced to chaos.