SOURCE: Eddins, Dwight. “‘Everything a Hunter and Everything Hunted’: Schopenhauer and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Critique 45, no. 1 (fall 2003): 25-33.

In the following essay, Eddins uses the philosophical theories of Arthur Schopenhauer to examine the aesthetics of Blood Meridian.

The great novelists of modern times have tended to be those whose visions estrange us from our familiar world to bring us back to it with unique new perspectives and an expanded sense of the human domain. Joyce, Faulkner, Mann, and Pynchon—to take four prominent examples—all destabilize and unsettle to construct an enhanced reality. Their subversion can be either epistemological or ontological or both; it may problematize the ways in which we construct reality or else problematize the very modes of being by which we define that reality. In practice, as Brian McHale notes, these two problematics tend to blur into each other:

[I]ntractable epistemological uncertainty becomes...