Cormac McCarthy

1. Cormac McCarthy 1933-present

2. Naturalist “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that a species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be this way will enslave you and make your life vacuous” (Woodward 30)

3. McCarthy’s dark philosophy is based around the existence of a impersonal force of pure evil found both inside of us and surrounding us. This evil leads to the inevitable bloodshed all creatures are doomed to face.

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhXJcfczNIc • What is he talking about when he says “you’ve been putting it up your whole life you just didn’t know it” • What does the fact that it is just another coin show? The coin don’t have no say it’s just you • What does this shopkeeper’s undeserving encounter show?

5. Born July 20th 1933 • Moved to Knoxville • Moved by surroundings • “What happened in these shacks fueled his imagination more than anything that happened inside his own family” (Woodward 31) • Joined Navy • Several awards

6. “appreciates wildness—in animals, landscapes, and people—and although he is a well born, well spoken, well read man of 58 (78 now) years, he has spent most of his adult life outside the ring of the campfire” (Woodward 28) • “Aware that gifted American writers don't have to endure the kind of neglect and hardship that have been his, McCarthy has chosen to be hard headed about the terms of his success. As he commemorated what is passing from memory-the lore, people and language of a pre-modern age-he seems immensely proud to be the kind of writer who has almost ceased to exist” (Woodward 31)

7. I have only one way to live. It doesn’t allow special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people don’t believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You’re asking that I second say the world. Do you see? Yes, She said, sobbing. I do. I truly do. Good, he said. That’s good. Then he shot her.

8. “the characters in Carson McCueller’s work made those in the Faulkner canon look like “the folks next door,” but such tame comparisons are meaningless when one comes to speak of McCarthy’s personae” (Sullivan 342)

9. Do you think God knows what’s happenin? I expect he does. You think he can stop it? No. I don’t. “When, past his crisis, he speaks with an attending priest he tells him that what he has learned close to death is that god ‘is not a thing. Nothing ever stops moving.’”

10. The papers said it was a crime of passion but there wasn’t passion to it. He’d been dating this girl, young as she was. He was nineteen. And he told me he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was goin to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t…I really believe he knew he was going to be in hell in fifteen minutes. I believe that. And I’ve thought about it a lot. He was not hard to talk to. Called me sheriff. But I didn’t know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul?