Sextant of the Upright

1. Sextant of the Upright The Stars (Frames), 1 “Pilgrims in a fable” pilgrimage: long journey of spiritual development Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (14th C) Dante’s Inferno (14th C ): “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” “Upright to what?” Book of Proverbs About: uprightness/path of righteous/the upbringing of sons What is the correct relation to the word of God? >> How is McCarthy revising this formulation of the problem?

2. Allusion in The Road McCarthy: “Books are made out of books” “McCarthy's style owes much to Faulkner's -- in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world -- a debt McCarthy doesn't dispute. "The ugly fact is books are made out of books," he says. "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." His list of those whom he calls the "good writers" -- Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner -- precludes anyone who doesn't "deal with issues of life and death." Proust and Henry James don't make the cut. "I don't understand them," he says. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange." -NYT

3. Sextant of the Upright The Stars (Frames), 2 “The child was his warrant” “wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand” (3) “If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (5) Double use of “warrant”: protector; evidence of authorization “each the other’s world entire” (6) “Barren, silent, godless” (4) >>> boy = word of God (5) Light/Seeing-Blindness/Darkness Repetition of light (3-4) Sustained: 18,

4. Sextant of the Upright “The Frailty of Everything Revealed at Last” “The child was his warrant” “wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand” (3) “If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (5) Double use of “warrant”: protector; evidence of authorization “each the other’s world entire” (6) “Barren, silent, godless” (4) >>> boy = word of God (5) Light/Seeing-Blindness/Darkness Repetition of light (3-4) Recurrence of “light”, figures of the lamp, firelight, etc. Blackness, sightless, impenetrable (15)

5. Sextant of the Upright Against the Philosophy of Death, 1 “The day providential to itself” “No lists of things to be done…” (55) “You will not face the truth. You will not” (68); also: (75)vs. “Sooner or later they will catch us…” (56) “You have no argument because there is none” (57) The woman is an exemplar of a philosophy of death – a calculation of the probable and the certain, letting the future (which is, at last, always a thought of death/ends) color her orientation in the world as it is. The man cannot answer an argument based in this philosophy of death. Why not?

6. Sextant of the Upright Against the Philosophy of Death, 2 The Zero Sum: An Ethics of Death Suicide, Cannibalism , walks the path of death – its reasoning is based on a calculation of death, of positioning self in relation to an horizon of death Ex. the woman, bloodcults/cannibals, thief? The Road of the Upright? Ex. the man and the boy McCarthy’s reversal of Proverbs: the FEAR of the LORD is the path of wisdom >>> refusal to submit to the ethics of death, which acts on fear of the imposition of a death certain, but unknown “Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies” (74)

7. Sextant of the Upright The Path of the Upright: The Fire The Bearers of the Fire “Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire” (83) Proverbs: the path of the righteous as guarantee; viz. if you are “good” God will protect you. Is this what McCarthy is after? No. Because he is also showing that you must also ceaselessly consider your relation to the earth and to others. Is the statement in its immediate context of the “good” actually TRUE in an of itself? Not a chance. They survive as much by the man’s knowledge of the natural world and human “nature” as they are sustained by their sense of ethics as issued by the boy.

8. Sextant of the Upright The Path of the Upright: The Fire The Bearers of the Fire “Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire” (83) Proverbs: the path of the righteous as guarantee; viz. if you are “good” God will protect you. Is this what McCarthy is after? No. Because he is also showing that you must also ceaselessly consider your relation to the earth and to others. Is the statement in its immediate context of the “good” actually TRUE in an of itself? Not a chance. They survive as much by the man’s knowledge of the natural world and human “nature” as they are sustained by their sense of ethics as issued by the boy.

9. Sextant of the Upright “The Upbringing of Sons” Upright to What?, Revisted Where does the boy get his morality? Three key repeated contexts of upbringing: stories about “courage and justice”; use of maps, observations of the land