Date of Award
12-2025
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts - English
Department
English
First Advisor
Dr. Michael Martin
Second Advisor
Dr. Kevin West
Third Advisor
Dr. Steven Marsden
Fourth Advisor
Dr. Owen Smith
Abstract
This thesis applies the metaphysics of philosopher Gilles Deleuze to Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, arguing that the novel initiates a thread of immanent subjectivity that unfolds throughout the Border Trilogy that follows it. Against a hierarchical metaphysics of transcendence, specifically an inverted Platonic Idealism, Blood Meridian dramatizes an immanent world of “optical democracy,” a prose style that levels the human and nonhuman and eludes subject and object categories. The kid’s autonomy from Judge Holden’s violent domination marks the truncated beginning of a Deleuzian subjectivity of becoming-other and immanent kinship. This incomplete gesture continues in the Border Trilogy, where its protagonists enact a more sustained subjectivity of identification with animals, forgotten peoples, and vanished worlds. Thus, together Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy form a “Border Tetralogy” in which McCarthy charts a dialectic move from transcendence to immanence and from subjection to hierarchies of violence to fragile, conjunctive forms of kinship. Since historicist approaches to McCarthy’s Westerns often read them as imaginative critiques of Manifest Destiny and colonialism, this metaphysical exploration of the “Border Tetralogy” can serve as an inquiry into the conceptual underpinnings that make historiography and nationalist mythologies possible. Moreover, a Deleuzian reversal of Holden’s inverted Platonism can open Blood Meridian to readings that avoid deterministic nihilism, creating space for a more affirmative metaphysical and moral vision of the novel and of McCarthy’s work in general.
Repository Citation
Reeves, Seth, "“War is God” and “Unguessed Kinships”: Blood Meridian and Cormac McCarthy’s “Border Tetralogy”" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 613.
https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/etds/613
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Included in
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