The Achievement Of Cormac Mccarthy Nihilism

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stating, “this is McCarthy’s metaphysic: none, in effect; no first principles, no foundational truth; Heraclitus without logos” (32). What Bell affirms in this passage is that during McCarthy’s novels. Bell’s The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy is the idea that McCarthy’s books are essentially nihilistic. This is a skin-deep interpretation as that is not nihilism. Nihilism is the acknowledgement of the absurdity of the universe.
Existentialism was accused of being overly pessimistic in Existentialism is a Humanism. “Others have condemned us for emphasizing what is despicable about humanity. For exposing all that is sordid. While ignoring beauty and the brighter side of human nature…that the fundamental reproach brought against [existentialists] …show more content…

Existentialism is a Humanism was published to give the general public a clearer understanding of existential philosophy.
Previous Western philosophical thought often asserted that all human activity was either divinely preordain or predestined prior to birth. Man does not have any specific nature. Man is the culmination of his choices or – as Sartre states – “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself” (Existentialism 22).
He has run away from home at the age of fourteen when the reader first meets the kid. The kid is also leaving behind the past in leaving his home in Tennessee for the West, all the things that he was, making the choice to recreate himself. McCarthy writes, “His origins are become as remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains as wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay” (Blood Meridian 4-5). In writing this, McCarthy is not only eviscerating the past for the kid, but he is also presenting the reader with a protagonist who lacks defined characteristics. The kid does not have a home, a name, a family, or a clear backstory. For the reader, the kid is essence-less.

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