No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy

Conclusion

Conclusion Finding Heroism through Empathy in McCarthy’s Novels You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me. —cormac mccarthy, The Sunset Limited What I need most is to learn charity. That most of all. —cormac mccarthy, The Stonemason Readers, which is to say living people, bring empathy to the novel, and they alone have the capacity to convert their emotional fusion with the denizens of make-believe worlds into actions on behalf of real others. —suzanne keen, Empathy and the Novel I n the account of his 1992 interview with McCarthy, Richard B. Woodward describes Blood Meridian (1985) as “the bloodiest book since The Iliad.” He points out, though, that in contrast to The Iliad, “[t]here are no heroes in this vision of the American frontier” (7). There are no traditional heroes anywhere in McCarthy’s corpus. Even “all-american cowboys” such as John Grady Cole betray cousins, defile virgins, and kill people (COTP 3). The overwhelming darkness of McCarthy’s novels, their often deranged and psychopathic characters, and their typically cold and distant narrators exacerbate the already stunning violence. The novels’ most vivid and immediate impression upon readers is of a universe roiling with misfits and bloodshed. Even in the austere and sterile descriptions of place for which McCarthy is known, nature seems to look on uncaring. Jay Ellis claims that in these “photographic” descriptions of nature, “we [. . .] glimpse a world given no distinction, no anthropocentric resonance. And indeed, McCarthy regularly warns us away from anthropocentric consolations.” Yet in this dark cosmos, the narrative gaze is shot through 162 No More Heroes with glimpses of human compassion, pity, nobility, and hope. Twin tensions tug at the heart of this literary cosmos: the implacable pull of the natural world away from “anthropocentric consolations” and the opposite draw in the direction of fundamental human kindness (265). Although they are few and far between, characters who affirm the value of life, both human and animal, are granted narrative powers, their perspectives merging with the “camera angle” that controls the text. For this reason, images of affinity and connection in McCarthy’s novels should not be underestimated. This study has demonstrated a systematic association of narrative perspective with characters’ moral choices, desires for affinity, and expressions of compassion that bear witness to primal urges to “do right” in contrast to the atavistic depravity surrounding them (ATPH 331). Furthermore, this stylistic device—associating particular narrative points of view with moral characters—suggests that one of narrative’s functions generally is to require readers to practice empathy, making the act of reading and the practice of narration moral acts in themselves. McCarthy’s fiction goes so far as to require readers to recognize an ineluctable bond between thematic explorations of the importance of empathy and the linguistic forms that encourage readers themselves to practice empathy as they identify with moral subjectivities. Examining the bond between aesthetic forms and the practice of empathy is not, of course, anything new. Martha Nussbaum expounds on precisely this link, and in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, she claims that novels construct meaningful empathy through assuming an established distance or estrangement between the reader and the fictional character. Therefore, the realistic novel, she says, creates characters who demonstrate “general human concerns,” permitting the reader to empathetically engage with the characters. These universally recognizable characters are then superimposed against depictions of society or social concepts in such a way that the reader is estranged enough to critique those social structures, questioning their assumptions and functions. Thus, she explains, “the very structure of the interaction between the text and its imagined reader invites the reader to see how the mutable features of society and circumstance bear on the realization of shared hopes and desires” (7). But in McCarthy’s novels, characters demonstrating “general human concerns” are rare specimens; most are bizarre, behaviorally inexplicable characters who seem to possess no reflective or evaluative consciousness. McCarthy essentially strips his literary universe of the familiar, but, as Nussbaum predicts, against this un- Conclusion 163 commonly darkly fantastic landscape, the few glimpses of familiar human drives and desires for connection, respect, love, and home are all the more profound. These brief moments are in many ways reiterations of a...