Notes on Blood Meridian Quotes

“Holden is both judge of the dance that was the scalp hunters’ war, and a personification of those universal energies, both superrational and madly foolish, that are war itself. Blood Meridian needs to be read not simply as a historical novel, but as a historical romance, in which characters move in intertextual regions between fiction and myth.”
― John Sepich, Notes on Blood Meridian

“McCarthy’s craft can better be appreciated when his reader can distinguish the nineteenth-century backgrounds within the imaginative synthesis of his novel. A review of source texts displays both McCarthy’s devotion to historical authenticity and the audacity with which he tailors sources to his own ends.”
― John Sepich, Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition

“McCarthy does not simplify this problem of information with omniscient introductions of characters, places, events.6 The kid, McCarthy’s protagonist, wouldn’t know who Albert Speyer is, since the kid didn’t ride with the Rangers during the Mexican War.”
― John Sepich, Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition