SOURCE: "Between the Wish and the Thing the World Lies Waiting," in The Southern Review, Vol. 28, No. 4, October, 1992, pp. 920-27.

In the following essay, Bell discusses the desires of McCarthy's characters to live in a world uncomplicated by the influences and demands the contemporary world places on them.

Cormac McCarthy's most sympathetic characters wish to live only in the mode of description—the less narrative the better—but the God that rules their world—an editor, clearly—likes stories and, either for his own amusement or to test them, he imposes plots upon them. Take this case of John Grady Cole, in All the Pretty Horses. The plot for him begins before he is born and with someone else's kin:

It runs in the family, said Blevins. My grandaddy was killed in a minebucket in West Virginia it run down in the hole a hunnerd and eighty feet...