SOURCE: Masters, Joshua J. “‘Witness to the Uttermost Edge of the World’: Judge Holden's Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Critique 40, no. 1 (fall 1998): 25-37.

In the following essay, Masters views the ambiguous character of Judge Holden as a trailblazer of the Wild West who seeks to fill the moral vacuum of that space with his own brand of “amoral logos.”

At the center of Cormac McCarthy's epic fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), we find Judge Holden,¹ a Mephistophelean figure who seduces a nomadic horde of scalp hunters into a “terrible covenant” (126), which consigns both their spiritual and physical lives to the judge's jurisdiction. With his “disciples of a new faith” (130), the judge wanders the Mexican-American borderlands like an anti-Moses, a lawgiver who has made no covenant with a higher power, save, of course, war. Amidst the arbitrary violence and mindless wanderings of the Glanton Gang, we find only...