Table of Contents
Guidelines
As with all of the previous short papers, the main requirement is to write a 4 page paper that quotes directly from the novel and demonstrates some general understanding of the book while making a coherent argument. Use the prompts below as guidance, but feel free to twist and embellish them as you find useful.
This is a very popular book with a lot written about it, especially concerning the judge and highly detailed accounts of the history it records. If you make use of any outside sources, even just to get ideas, you must cite them to avoid plagiarism. Any work containing uncited words or ideas from anyone else will receive a zero.
Prompts
- Violence: Violence is the inescapable reality of this text. Violence is so deeply suffused in the writing that even while it remains horrific, it becomes a persistent object of study. The variety of violence, the depth of violence, and seeming total absence of remorse allows us as
- readers to contemplate, assess, and compare the types and styles of violence at work. While much of our contemporary discourse of violence attempts to understand the unique personal, psychological motivations that produce violent acts, Blood Meridian wants to take on violence as a global, historical, and perhaps even “natural” phenomenon. Write a paper that examines the representation of violence in the novel and argues for a particular purpose or meaning to it.
- History: Blood Meridian is a historical novel built around the Glanton Gang’s real-life atrocities as well as the larger world of the American southwest in the middle of the 19th century. Rather than tell a story about major events of the Mexican-American war or stories of heroics from any side, McCarthy focuses on a group of historical villains guilty of major crimes without major motivations. Develop an argument that argues for the value of this particular choice of focus. Since a highly poetical novel is a unique choice for representing history, be sure that your paper accounts for the relationship between the content and the form McCarthy choses to capture and represent it.
- Nature: Nearly to the extent that the novel describes acts of violence, it just as thoroughly presents the variety of natural landscapes that make up the American southwest. Most of these landscapes are hostile to the people who inhabit them, but they are not without their beauty. In the narration of these landscapes are some of the most poetic and philosophical aspects of the book, especially in terms of the human relationship to nature. Beyond the narration, the judge is a primary examiner of nature and offers a number of postulates about the nature of nature. Looking closely at the language of the text, examine these representations of nature and develop a claim about the book’s understanding of the natural world. If you’re working with passages by the judge rather than the narrative voice, be sure to account for his unreliable character in your argument.
- Beyond Nature: While the nature of man and of the world are frequent themes in the book, lurking within or just beyond these questions are more openly metaphysical questions about the purpose, intention, or meaning of that existence. These are metaphysical questions because, for the majority of belief systems no essential verification for these ideas can be sought in the world itself. The judge is the
- primary figure in the book associated with the metaphysical and the beyond-explanation, but there are many other moments both in the story and in the narration that are subject to this kind of questioning. If your focus is on the judge, avoid a simplistic argument of whether he is or is not the devil. The answer to that question is ultimately ambiguous, while the suggestion that he is is already plainly stated in the text. Paying close attention to moments of the unexplainable, supernatural, or otherwise metaphysical, write a paper that develops an argument about the purpose of those elements in the novel.
- 4 pages
- 12 pt, Times New Roman font, double-spaced, 1” margins, with page numbers and a descriptive title
- Works Cited page if you use any sources other than McCarthy
- Clear and arguable thesis that responds to the prompt
- Well organized paragraphs using topic sentences
- Accurately formatted quotations from the novel with compelling analysis
Grading and Requirements
What Students Are Saying About Us
.......... Customer ID: 12*** | Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐"Honestly, I was afraid to send my paper to you, but you proved you are a trustworthy service. My essay was done in less than a day, and I received a brilliant piece. I didn’t even believe it was my essay at first 🙂 Great job, thank you!"
.......... Customer ID: 11***| Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"This company is the best there is. They saved me so many times, I cannot even keep count. Now I recommend it to all my friends, and none of them have complained about it. The writers here are excellent."
“Order a custom Paper on Similar Assignment at essayfount.com! No Plagiarism! Enjoy 20% Discount!”
