SOURCE: Douglas, Christopher. “The Flawed Design: American Imperialism in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Critique 45, no. 1 (fall 2003): 3-24.

In the following essay, Douglas proposes that N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian are borne from the need to critically examine the European-American foundational tenets upon which the Southwest was colonized.

The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience.

(Slotkin 5)

History and rhetoric—which is to say, conquest by arms and conquest by the word: the discovery of America is the modern instance par excellence of how these two kinds of violence are entwined; how metaphor...