SOURCE: Campbell, Neil. “‘Beyond Reckoning’: Cormac McCarthy's Version of the West in Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West.” Critique 39, no. 1 (fall 1997): 55-64.

In the following essay, Campbell presents Blood Meridian as a re-creation of the traditional Western novel and its archetypal mythos.

Depend upon it, there is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth.

—Max Muller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873)¹

Frederick Jackson Turner claimed in 1893 that

[t]he United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution.

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On that page Turner inscribed his version of history, marking out his...