“Whatever exists without my knowledge exists without my consent”: Solipsism versus Free Will in Blood Meridian.

Abstract

Blood Meridian has been called one of the greatest novels of the English language, in no small part due to its unapologetic representation of violence to explore a collage of thematic mainstays of western literature. For all its importance, however, its purposefully muddy, cryptic narrative has prevented analyses of the same from avoiding heavy-handed, nihilistic readings of the work. In these analyses, the subject of free will and the rhetorical trappings of the Judge are usually glossed over—free will usually misunderstood as irrelevant for pessimistic, materialist narratives. In this paper, I submit that such a reading—common as it is—is misguided, given the theoretical cues present in the work. I analyse these cues under the framework of their most representative advocates—Thomas Hobbes and David Hume—and bring their understanding to what the work is conveying about these matters. This analysis concludes that the work is very concerned about free will and, indeed, underscores its importance throughout, even characterizing the main conflict of the work in a way only consistent with those terms. Finally, this paper argues that the world presented in Blood Meridian is, then, not as bleak or defeatingly nihilistic as a superficial reading of the work would suggest.