[csharpminor]

I'll just add: in my own opinion this epilogue is a bit of literary trickery. Like the past, it's difficult to parse. As the epilogue, it naturally occupies a place of significance. This must be the key to understanding Blood Meridian!

But after wracking your brain trying to decrypt the message, you realize that it just says there is no greater meaning to the violence of the book. It is just people doing things on a vast plain.

It's almost as though McCarthy is saying to us, "See? You're still looking for a deeper meaning that does not exist."

[dclowd9901]

I’m about halfway through this book and I’d say this is a very apt explanation, but a bit handwavey.

McCarthy seemed to deal _absurdly well_ in the banality of the pitches of life, both high and low. One always leads to another. It’s a sort of nihilism but with a karmic baseline. Reading his prose I got the sense I shouldn't make much out of anything, but all the same, it still happened and is worth talking about.

[csharpminor]

Yes, I think the detail and lyricism of the prose intentionally causes us to look for a moral framework for the story.

Many readers feel cognitive dissonance from this book: there’s so much detail, it must add up to some moral lesson. You’ll hear people say, “Blood Meridian is an amazing book, but I don’t understand it.”

They’re still trying to apply a moral label to the story and can’t find one. To quote The Judge, “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”

McCarthy’s message in Blood Meridian may be that we see a higher fidelity picture of the old west if we don’t attempt to fit events into a moral arc. Still worth discussing, but we must abandon good vs. evil as a framework if we want a glimpse at the truth of what happened.