Philosopher Thomas Hobbes proposes a key fundamental concept that ‘humanity is innately predisposed to exhorting power and influence on their environment as much as possible.’ Both ‘Blood Meridian’ by Cormac McCarthy and ‘The Power’ by Naomi Alderman present narratives with a twisted nihilistic perspective by holding the view that to fulfil this innate drive for power, the only way to do so is through violence which ends up being nothing but self-serving, that leads to the total destruction of their environment and themselves. Both McCarthy and Alderman present the structure of these novels by unveiling this violence through the disintegration of the characters’ moral compasses, which causes this violent unconscious to corrode with the societal …show more content…
His lack of ability to ‘read or write’ could be interpreted as his rejection of semantics and the Bible, which establishes the moral and spiritual ignorance he had at the beginning of the book. In the period in which the book is set in around 1850, religion was often regarded as a component of societal expectations. By employing the kid’s immediate rejection of these values and principles and resorting to violence. This could be evaluated as a critique of religion, as it illustrates how easy it is to stray from it. Consequently, due to this spiritual and moral ignorance, he must seek guidance within himself. This internal drive and ambition may lead him to assert violence over his environment as much as possible. Critic Steven Shario proposes that the entire novel makes clear that the human world always has, and will be a world of killing.” This is reinforced further through examples such as McCarthy’s linguistic use of the ‘Kid’ which is starkly contrasted to …show more content…
Alderman and McCarthy deploy a cyclical narrative to display how the violence ultimately becomes self-destructive. ‘Blood Meridian’ Deploys this when presenting how The Judge serves as an extended metaphor for ultimate violence and power after murdering The Kid. He is described as, “Dancing in light and shadow, he is a great favourite. He never sleeps, Judge. He is dancing, he says that he will never die.’ We ultimately see this final reminder from McCarthy that evil exists everywhere, by creating the contrasts of light and darkness between where the Judge dances, he may be showing to the reader that this violence is ultimately inescapable and lies within us all. As McCarthy is known to implement a lot of religious imagery within his books, this could potentially be seen throughout the Judge's character, by stating that his presence is everywhere, this may be reflective of God’s omnipresent characteristics. By having the Judge serve as a direct antithesis to God, this may only emphasise his destructiveness. We see further emphasis on power and control through the nature of his ‘dancing and dancing.’ Critics often interpret dancing as a metaphor for warfare; in previous chapters, the Judge describes the idea of a dance to The Kid to be ritualistic and of strictly ordered activity in which everyone has a specific role to play.
Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) is Cormac McCarthy's fifth book. McCarthy is an American novelist. He has written ten novels and he also won the Pulitzer Prize. Blood Meridian was among Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005 [1] and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years [2]. This novel is known as one of the most violent books in literature. However, in this case the aim of this paper is to focus in other interesting aspect of the story: the use of religious imagery.
What is power to a human? As time has gone by, there have been many forms of control and influence in the world. Many strive to achieve total rule over a society or group of individuals. Yet the question still presents itself to the average man. Why does man desire power so greatly even though there is visible trouble that follows? Shelley’s Frankenstein, Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”, and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, whether through the situation or the character themselves, depict the evils and hardships due to an imbalance and poor management of power.
Conroy expresses both negative and positive diction to juxtapose the brutal realities of life with the wonderful possibilities in books. He describes books as “dazzling” and “magnificent”. While conversely describing the parents and school boards as “know-nothing” and “cowardly’, which gives the audience a comparison between the two. Since Conroy uses diction to contrast the positive and negative, the audience sees how banning the books makes the parents and school board look like “teacher haters”. The image of teacher haters appeals to the audience’s emotions. This is how he gains their trust. Conroy also uses “grotesque” to describe the violence in his book about the
The desire for power is prevalent in our day to day life from wanting control over little insignificant aspects to control over others. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is
Throughout the whole book beginning on pp.14 and ending with his death, the Kid seems to have had his life manipulated in someway or other by the Judge. Like the dancing bear on pp.326, the Kid dances to the beat of the Judge’s “fiddle.'; What does the dance mean to the judge though? Its seems as though the “dance'; represents life and life is only good for one thing, war. If one does not “offer up himself to the blood of war (pp.331),'; then that man cannot dance and thus cannot live. Is this why the Kid must die in the end of the book? Because he had chosen to stray away from the fate the Judge had set for him and “elect therefore some opposite course (pp.330)?';
Imperialism has been a constant oppressive force upon societies dating back hundreds of years. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, illustrates this oppression by providing an instance of its occurrence in the Congo of Africa, while simultaneously setting the stage for The Poisonwood Bible, which is essentially the continuation of the story. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, demonstrates how the Congo is still affected by modern circumstances and ideology. Conrad’s novella acts as a sort of precursor to the events later depicted in Kingsolver’s novel, and this very connection between the stories illustrates the perpetual oppression of imperialism. This oppression is shown through the characterization of the pivotal characters of each respective text.
The narrator makes statements that may come off as unpatriotic and anti- Christian. It is also true that the story may be too descriptive of gore filled events, but this should not stop someone from finishing the book. Once the reader gets through the mature content, they are able to see the true meaning of the story. They find out that the reason behind the novel was to warn people about sending kids to war. They can get many types of psychological diseases that cannot be cured by pills, treatments, or therapy.
McCarthy portrays the man as one sacrificing and doing anything humanly possible for the one he loves which is the boy. The type of love that is visible in this novel isn’t found in usual novels. Instead of portraying just a father and son relationship, it also presents a representative of a self-sacrifice and companionship. Even though, both the father and the son care dearly for the survival of one another, in the first quarter of the novel, the term of euthanasia is suddenly taken into consideration. The father had thoughts of killing his own son, because he said that the truth was that the boy was keeping him alive, “They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart. But he knew that if he were a good father still it might well be as she had said. That the boy was all that stood between him and death” (8). McCarthy creates through diction how important the boy is to the man for the man feels as if the boy is the only reason he alive. . In this novel McCarthy presents through imagery ...
Cannibals and murderers are abundant, but the father does not want his son to only experience this world. Born after the world’s end, the son has never seen the beauty of life. All he knows is death. The father tries to have a “normal” life with his son, whatever normal is in this new world. Cormac McCarthy is able to use varying structures to beautifully portray this element of Safety vs Terror, through his lack of names, sentence fragments, and declarative sentences.
In 2009, the campus of Richmond High became the scene of a gang bang. A sixteen-year-old was intoxicated and raped by a group of ten men on a high school campus. High school’s are seen as a peaceful area, where not many disgusting crimes would take place, but on that night it was turned into a pig-pen, “‘They were kicking her in her head and they were beating her up, robbing her and ripping her clothes off; it's something you can't get out your mind,’ Rodriguez said. ‘I saw people, like, dehumanizing her; I saw some pretty crazy stuff’” (Vega par. 4). Just like in Lord of the Flies, a group of people with one idea can do anything, no matter the situation surrounding them. That school was innocent and had very few troubles before the incident, but after it happened, many more problems sprouted from it. The rapists not only caused a girl to go through so much pain, but also destroyed the school’s esteem and the student’s attitudes. English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, believed that humans are naturally evil and selfish. He stated that there needs to be a strong government, or else the citizens will take over and corrupt it. In Lord of the Flies, a group of boys without any stronger force over them, take control of the island and eventually destroy it with corruption. In any situation, the human’s need for power will influence the surroundings and contaminate all signs of humanity, while destroying peace and
Parents in modern society routinely attempt to shield their children from what they view as evils of the world. Adults censor television they watch, conversations they have, and books they read. In so doing, parents feel that they are guarding their children from knowledge that they may not be emotionally capable of handling. However, it also is imperative in the highly competitive atmosphere of modern society for youth to become prepared for the pressures of adulthood. Ironically, the dangerous knowledge parents believe they are hiding from their children inevitably is learned through exposure. In the domain of literature, a parent may feel that a particular book attracts attention to inappropriate or taboo issues, neglecting the positive aspects of that same work. This is the situation that has developed with Lois Lowry's The Giver, a book opposed by parents across the nation. Throughout the novel, despite challenges that have emerged based in her use of euphemistic expressions for euthanasia within a utopian society, the author nonetheless demonstrates the importance of experiential learning and the valuable lessons to be learned by working through the negative aspects of life.
From the displays of power that have been shown through out this essay, we see that this story is a story about power. Power is the story is primarily about peoples need for some small amount of power to survive in life and to feel that hey have a purpose within their society which every society it may be whether its is Gilead or Nazi Germany or modern day Britain.
The exploration of the west was no walk in the park. There were some bloody and gruesome battles that took place. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Blood Meridian, he demonstrates how bloody and gruesome the expansion to the west really was. The author uses the literary theory of Deconstruction to show the reader how dark this era really was. McCarthy demonstrates this by using vivid detail during the fights and battles, while staying historically accurate, with the constant presence between good and evil throughout the novel.
The dictionary definition of a child is a young human being, an immature person and offspring (Oxford, 1976). This idea is reflected in Mead’s statement ‘that children to adults are representative of something weak and helpless in need of protection, supervision, training, models, skills, beliefs and ‘character’’ (Montgomery et al, 2003, p vii). The emphasis is on the concept of the child by adults rather than the size or mentality raising the notion that a child, and therefore childhood, is not just a biological concept but also an ideological one (Falconer, 2009). This ideology makes an oxymoron of Children’s Literature according to Rose (Hunt, 2009a) as adults write, publish and purchase books with each set of adults having their own ideas about childh...
Often, too much power can go to that particular person’s head, and he/she can become corrupt. As readers have seen in literature, abuses of power are often harmful to the abuser and their subjects. Corrupted authority and abuses of power eventually lead to the collapse of society. This concept is shown many times throughout the novel Lord Of the Flies and the short story “I Only Came to Use the Phone”. Displayed through characters and actions, abusive power has dominated what should be morally correct in literature.