Suttree by Cormac Mccarthy: Critical Analysis and Review

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Quote from Suttree

"But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didn't say so" (372).

This quote embodied Cormac McCarthy's fourth novel and personified the main character, Cornelius Suttree, who traveled through the wasteland of the Tennessee River valley as a fisher of men.

Scholarship:

D. S. Butterworth's Scholarly Essay on Suttree

In Pearls As Swine: Recentering the Marginal in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree D. S. Butterworth argued that McCarthy treated the condemned characters of the Knoxville outcasts as geological and archaeological finds. According to Butterworth, McCarthy's characters were spirits who by happenstance temporarily inhabit a body. Individuals were characterized by the futility of their actions each going about their daily tasks but never actually achieving anything. Consider the scene of the Reese family who spent countless hours on the Tennessee River farming for worthless Tennessee River pearls. Just as Butterworth pointed out in his essay, alcohol, money and lust drove this family to continue to labor in vain regardless of the inevitable fact that their efforts were doomed from the beginning.

Butterworth also highlighted McCarthy's manipulation of time in Suttree. McCarthy's use of time was especially unique in two ways. First, McCarthy did not focus much attention on developing the reader's clear understanding to Suttree's past. Instead, McCarthy was simply interested in the here and now. Butterworth noted this in his essay saying, "We are introduced to Suttree and his circumstances with very little attention to what precisely happened in the past, why he does what he does, what he hopes to achieve. There is no progress, no advance...

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...number on several different occasions. He trapped Gene Harrogate in the cave for four days. On page 198, the goat man said, "I had three and it was three too many. He squinted his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. The good book says that there'll be seven women for every man. Well somebody else can have my other four what about you?" Then on page 199 McCarthy went on to mention the number four again by saying, "Jesus wept over Lazarus, said the goat man. It don't say it, but I reckon Lazarus might of wept back when he seen himself back in this vale of tears after he'd done been safe and dead four days." This quote also brings me into my second question with the novel. What was the significance with McCarthy mentioning Jesus weeping? McCarthy mentioned it twice: with the above-mentioned quote and again on page 197 when he simply said, "JESUS WEPT."

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