Blood Meridian's Ending Explained

a man walks into a bar no this isn't the start of a joke in fact instead of laughing you'll probably be depressed at the end of this story the man Swagger's up to the bar cowboy hat on his head and thick boots clapping on the wood and twirls a coin on the counter before slapping it down and ordering a whiskey this man is then approached by a judge though it's not a normal judge this judge has pale almost purely white skin and no eyebrows and no hair on his enormous head he stands near seven feet tall and is wide and very strong and his attire is that of a wealthy entrepreneur of the Old West the two talk as if they know each other for a while and the man tries to leave the judge but the judge points the gun at him and they continued to talk they're having a strange argument the judge believes the man came to this bar looking for him the man says the judge is crazy he didn't come to the bar looking for anyone the judge describes them both as dancers whose destiny is to dance whether they like it or not baffled the man says anyone can dance even animals what's so special about dancing the judge says that on the stage he's imagining there's only room for one animal in the spotlight the others must step down into the dark finally the man builds up the courage to walk away and in order to relax he finds himself one of the call girls who are looking for customers he pays and takes her to a back room and once they're done he goes outside and crosses a wooden walkway into a large outhouse with a closet inside to his surprise the judge is waiting for him within completely naked sitting atop the closet the judge leaps up grabs the man and locks the door behind him later a group of men are gathered outside the outhouse one of them warns the others not to try to go in the others open the door and look inside and are too horrified by what they see to speak meanwhile the judge has already returned to the bar and by now a dance floor has been set up and he's dancing naked in front of everyone elegant and practiced and skilled the story ends what you just heard was the ending of blood meridian if you're like most people you're probably wondering what happened here when I first read this book I also wondered what the heck was going on honestly my first reading of blood meridian was overall a negative experience and at the time this vague and bizarre ending was like the culmination of everything I hated about the book too much unintelligible philosophizing too many actions taken with no explanation before or after and too many things left with no description at all so that sometimes there seemed to be events happening that no joke seemed to have no context no clear description and no explanation it was the literary equivalent of being randomly knocked unconscious from behind waking up asking the people around you what happened and having them say oh this videos focus will be to give context description and explanation to the most context list description list and explanation list ending to a story you've probably ever read in your life [Music] the judge raped and killed the man over the 35 years since blood meridian was published many different theories about what exactly happened between the judge and the man have emerged some think the judge sexually violated the man but didn't kill him others think the judge killed the man but did not sexually violate him I'm here to tell you that he did both let's start with the rape since that may be the most shocking assertion to people it probably seems like I'm jumping to conclusions the judge was naked therefore he raped the man what why let me explain throughout the book the judge has given many established characteristics he is an artist he sketched with a practiced ease and he put this into his book with nice shadings an economy of pencil strokes he is a draftsman as he is other things well sufficient to the task he is a diplomat kindly address your remarks to me lieutenant I represent captain Glanton in all legal matters I think you should know first of all that the captain does not propose to be called a liar and I would think twice before I involve myself with him in an affair of Honor he is the definition of a Renaissance man the man's a hand at anything I've never seen him turned to a task but what he didn't prove clever in it he speaks Dutch he can cut a trail shoot a rifle ride a horse track a deer some of these characteristics are simply described and others are explicitly demonstrated but one characteristic is demonstrated more thoroughly and repeatedly than any other the fact that the judge is a prolific rapist multiple times over the course of the book whenever the judge stays in town for a long period a child ends up missing or dead outside voices cold across the steep hillsides a little girl was missing and parties of citizens had turned out to search the mine chance he'd filled his pockets with little candy deaths heads and he sat by the door and offer these two children passing on the walk under the eaves Glanton could see crouched in a corner a Mexican or half-breed boy maybe 12 years old he was naked save for a pair of old cows honest and makeshift sandals of uncured high who's this child to the judge late in the story even a tribe of Native Americans attacked the camp the judge is staying at with his entourage the judges discovered waiting for them with a large cannon and a twelve-year-old girl in his bedroom naked so the judge is 100% of rapists but one interesting moment earlier in the story is the situation of the little half Mexican boy the judge kills there's a storm the night the boy dies and that same night the judges seem strutting around naked in the rain looking very pleased with himself someone had reported the judge naked atop the walls immense and pale and the revelations of lightning striding the perimeter up there and declaiming in the old epic mode the next morning is when they find the boy dead and the horse stable naked and with a broken neck everyone is disturbed by the sight and no one accuses the judge of doing it someone had found the boy he was lying face down naked in one of the cubicles the squatters crowded in and stood about the corpse in silence gruesome yes but also familiar after the judge and the man have their encounter in the outhouse the judge is naked and gleeful and dancing and those who discover the evidence of his mysterious deed are disturbed by the sight it may be true that the man is not a child but the judge has had his eye on the man since he was 16 years old back when they first met each other moving on the fact that the man is murdered is probably obvious instead of trying to explain why he would be dead let's focus for a second on why McCarthy decided not to describe the murder in detail McCarthy's biggest known influences William Faulkner an American author known for stories with surface level events that obscure deeper more conceptual plot lines hidden beneath the words in his short story arose for Emily we read of a woman who spends her entire life in her home until one day she falls in love with a man who sticks by her side then suddenly this man disappears and the woman goes back to staying in her home when the woman finally dies of old age the townsfolk break into the house and find many of the disappeared man's belongings in the Attic they find a bed with a corpse lying in it here are the final paragraphs the man himself lay in the bed for a long while we just stood there looking down at the profound and fleshless grin the body had apparently once lain in an attitude of embrace but now the long sleep that outlasts love that conquers even the grimace of Love had cuckold at him what was left of him rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biting dust then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head one of us lifted something from it and leaning forward that faint and invisible dust dry and accurate in the nostrils we saw a long strand of iron gray hair the implication is that the old woman had been sleeping with the corpse all these years thus the remaining strand of hair this literary tradition of subtlety even in the most climactic moments is what McCarthy was following in his depiction of the man's death he likely feels there's much greater power in not saying something than there is in saying it this understandably frustrates many readers why did the judge kill the man no boy the answer to that is so complicated I'm actually going to have to make another video to fully delve into it but for the purposes of a clear and concise explanation we can zero in on the absolute most important reasons the judge had like I said when they meet in the bar the judge immediately starts talking to the man about dancing plenty of time for the dance I ain't studying no dance you're here for the dance knowing now that the judge was going to kill the man later we understand that the dance is completely metaphorical and obviously refers to some kind of deadly conflict for the judge the dance is a euphemism for the word fighting but it's the sort of conflict that exceeds the limitations of the word fighting the sort of conflict he's imagining cannot end with a hand because it can only end when one side has destroyed the other if it's halted even for years it has only been paused not concluded think of it like war when two nations declare war they are admitting the impossibility of settling their differences and agreeing that in order for either to be satisfied one must cease to exist forever here's what the judge has to say about war it makes no difference what men think of war war endures war was always here before man was war waited for him the ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner that is the way it was and will be that way and not some other way suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager saved their lives who has not heard such a tale a turn of the card the whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man that his what more certain validation of a man's worth could there be this enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate the selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable this is the nature of war scene so war is the truest form of divination it is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select war is the ultimate game but even war is a metaphor here because the judge isn't talking about grudges between States he's talking about grudges between wills the war metaphor breaks down as all metaphors do the deeper we dig into its concrete meaning because in the end soldiers are not fighting to exert their will upon their enemies but to serve their nation what the judge is really getting at is a clash of wills which can only take place between individuals and is therefore not a war but a sort of fight the use of the dance as a metaphor is also limited but insightful as it allows us to think of a conflict of wills as an artistic expression of the ideas the combatants hold deep inside as a dancer communicates complex emotions through simple gestures and movements to individuals engaged in a battle to the death are not only acting upon their ideas with violence but expressing their ideas through violence put simply the metaphor of war teaches us that to the judge a person's will is only validated by its dominance over other wills meanwhile the metaphor of dancing teaches us that to the judge forcing your will upon a person is the highest form of expressing your will by this logic the seeking of competition and extinguishing of competitors is more important to the validation of one's will than the formulation of one's will what I mean is to the judge the specifics of your opinion are less important than the dominance of your opinion over others if facts when arguments then victory is the greatest fact of all literally might makes right might does not make right etc the man that wins in some combat is not vindicated morally moral law is an invention of mankind to the judge a moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test a man falling dead in a duel is not thought their byes to be proven in error as to his views is very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view but the argument is indeed trivial but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest decisions of life and death of what shall be and what shall not beggar all questions of right in elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed moral spiritual natural so what is it about the judge in the man that makes them combatants it's best explained by surveying their history together 10 years before their fateful meeting at the bar the judge and the man went on a long adventure together along with a huge group of companions travelling all throughout Mexico and murdering Native Americans they made a living by selling the scalps of the natives to the local Mexican towns and though they were only supposed to kill the violent groups like the Apaches they soon started murdering peaceful tribes too afterward a tribe of Native Americans attacked and murdered nearly everyone and in the end the man in the judge were the only two left standing the man was caught and arrested and the judge came to visit him in jail in his visit the judge scolded the man for having failed to be fully committed to the slaughter of the Native Americans the man had felt bad for them when he should have been mercilessly killing them why because they needed to die so the man could get his money the man wanted his money so they had to die and that was simply all there could be to the matter this was how the judge saw the world and he expected everyone else to see things the same way but the man always sat on the fence he did what was commanded of him and nothing more despite the fact that he was clearly a talented killer whenever his life depended on it he became a sharpshooter to rival the greatest of all time but if he was not forced by circumstance he defaulted to a live and let live attitude on multiple occasions was it always your idea he said that if you did not speak he would not be recognized you see me the judge ignored this I recognized you when I first saw you the judge is referencing the man's tendency to stay off to the side a clear effort he made throughout his life to stay neutral neutral people have no will which can be opposed and thus never engage in a conflict this disgusted the judge who saw the man as a kindred spirit a fellow dancer who was refusing to dance the final conversation between the judge and the man at the bar is extremely deep and has multiple layers at which it can be analyzed but in order to save time will summarize it as the judge believing that everything in the universe has a purpose and the man believing the opposite in their conversation they discuss why the man is there at the bar the judge believes the man came there to meet the judge and the man thinks he came there just to have a good time all a coincidence even so at the last I find you here with me I ate with you the judge raised his bald brow not he said he looked about him in a puzzled and artful way I never come here hunting you what would I want with you I come here same reason as any man and what reason is that they come here to have a good time the judges argument is that coincidence is humanity's explanation for acts of God because God's intentions are so complex that they can only be interpreted as coherence they do not have to have a reason but order is not set aside because of their indifference if it is so that they themselves have no reason and yet are indeed here must they not be here by reason of some other and if this is so can you guess who that other might be but what is God in the judges eyes war is God so we're back to that concept of conflicting wills the judge believes there is an unnamed force pushing together all worthy adversaries who have conflicting wills in order for their deadly conflict to prove through violence and death whose philosophy is true there's no point in arguing as far as the judge is concerned one will live and one will die and he who lives will have proven his point more profoundly than any words can express the judges will is one of dominance the man's one of ambivalence moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak the two are opposed because the judges will cannot be valid while a deadly skilled and experienced warrior roams the world peacefully allowing people to do what they want this is my claim he said and yet everywhere I've wanted are pockets of autonomous life autonomous the man contradicts the judge by existing everybody don't have to have a reason to be someplace I've been everywhere this is just one more place the judge set the bottle of the bar he a man there is room on the stage for one beast and one alone all others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name one by one they will step down into the darkness before the four clamps bares the dance bears that don't and that's why the judge raped and killed the man the epilogue will be in a video for another time if you enjoyed this please leave a comment what do you think of my explanation what other aspects of blood meridian do you want analyze what other books would you like me to discuss thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Benjamin August Literature

Views: 188,426

Keywords: cormac mccarthy, blood meridian, judge holden, the judge, the kid, the man, evening redness in the west

Id: 5C_Px6_TuL4

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 26 2019