No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy

Introduction

Introduction Narrative Perspective and Morality in McCarthy’s Novels The arc of the moral universe is indeed long but it does bend toward justice. —cormac mccarthy, The Stonemason The naturalistic novel is therefore not so superficial or reductive as it implicitly appears to be in its conventional definition. It involves a belief that life on its lowest levels is not so simple as it seems to be from higher levels. It suggests that even the least significant human being can feel and strive powerfully and can suffer the extraordinary consequences of his emotions [. . .]. —donald pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction I n The Orchard Keeper (1965), jailed bootlegger Marion Sylder criticizes the idealistic fervor of young John Wesley Rattner. “[Y]ou want to be some kind of goddamned hero,” he tells the boy. “Well, I’ll tell ye, they ain’t no more heroes” (214). In general, Cormac McCarthy’s bleak literary worlds, scarred by grotesque images of human squalor and depravity , lend credence to the bootlegger’s claim. But despite the “nihilistic mood” that seems to brood over these brutal landscapes, the concept of heroism is not completely consigned to ancient history (Bell 1). Examples like the father’s despairing yet self-sacrificial love for his son in The Road (2006) suggest instead that questions about the definition of heroism and goodness may be intrinsic to human nature. A complex dialectic between despair and idealism runs through McCarthy’s corpus, making any attempt to identify a unifying worldview in the novels a challenging, if not impossible , task. However, the novels consistently illuminate the valiant inner struggles of men trying against all odds to be good. In these cases, the 2 No More Heroes narrative shifts from McCarthy’s typical mode, an omniscient third-person narrator, to a limited third- or even first-person perspective, permitting readers to engage empathetically with the character’s moral thoughts, perceptions , or intentions. While McCarthy’s literary cosmos may be creeping closer and closer to apocalyptic damnation, narrative shifts in point of view and brief yet provocative revelations of interior thought draw attention to those characters seeking community and justice—characters who, in other words, demonstrate a fragile heroism in the face of doom. Of course, declaring that there may be merit in studying narrative perspective and its relationship to empathy and morality in McCarthy’s novels raises an immediate objection: namely, that one of the most notable—and noted—narrative techniques McCarthy employs is his restriction of revealed internal thoughts and perceptions. Richard B. Woodward claims, for instance, that McCarthy is a “writer who renders the brutal actions of men in excruciating detail, seldom applying the anesthetic of psychology” (28). Jay Ellis likewise draws readers’ attention to the “salient feature” of McCarthy’s style, “the absence of regular psychologizing” (5), while James Bowers considers it “striking to find a contemporary writer of McCarthy’s gifts that has so spurned the Joycean tradition of interiority” (14). Rick Wallach also points out that McCarthy’s earliest published writings, his short stories, demonstrate a “descriptive distance from the character’s center of consciousness [that] reaches its apogee in the mature works, [where it becomes] a key tenet of McCarthy’s style” (20). Such critical concurrence reflects the almost overpowering impact of McCarthy’s most typical narrative style, the objective, omniscient narrator so tonally distant and removed that readers feel as if they were watching the fictional events from the wrong end of a telescopic lens. McCarthy’s narrative style therefore seems to almost consciously reject the twentieth-century novel’s attention to the important role of literary empathy. In Empathy and the Novel, Suzanne Keen claims that literary empathy , a reader’s “vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect” with a fictional character, has not always been perceived as a boon (4). From their birth in the early eighteenth century, novels were suspected of dangerously stirring up too many passions (37). It was only the “translation of Einfuhlung in the early twentieth century” that finally created a sea change in popular views on empathy, most notably captured by Virginia Woolf’s radical assertion that empathy, rather than narrative, ought to be the driving force of fiction (59). Some contemporary theorists criticize such ethically motivated ap- Introduction 3 proaches to literature, worrying that overemphasizing empathy as a reason for reading may flatten or ignore the variances of human experience and expression. But Keen argues...