Literary Criticism 

Cormac McCarthy is known as one of the most depressing novelists of all time, his stories talk about some of the worst things imaginable that delve into real life topics,  “The world is indeed a dark, dangerous place. Rapists, racists, necrophiliacs. Murderers, cannibals, cartels. Corrupt cops, corrupt governments, and human traffickers. All populate the pages of Mr. McCarthy’s novels.” - Wade James.  Cormac McCarthy’s pessimistic attitude about life shines through his novels like the road which is a desolate earth that discusses  how messed up people would be during the end of the world, and the struggle to survive, “The Road describes life in terms so negative and catastrophic that its characters' symptomatic anxiety becomes a structural and collective condition”. This is one quote from Francisco Collado-Rodriguez that shows how people look at Cormac's pessimism not as something that makes a story shine but as something brings the tone down and makes the novel a rough read. Cormac has a very nihilistic point of view on life,and it shines through his books, while there are a lot of people who read it and respect the fact that he is willing to talk about such topics, plenty of critics don’t enjoy the idea of these books being so pessimistic and nihilistic.

Cormac was in the military and was apart of the air force he looked a lot into the effects of PTSD and trauma, specifically with the brutality of war, in blood meridian the novel takes place during the Mexican american war, and shows how traumatizing war is to the human psyche now while this is a topic that needs to be discussed books are a safe space for a lot of people and cormac dives into heavily traumatizing things in his novels that someone may have experienced , he was writing “In a period significantly characterized by the post traumatic collective sense that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks and by ecological fears concerning global warming” - Rodriguez-Collado Francisco. When discussing these topics its very important to put a warning at the beginning, and discuss it with maturity because most people have been through something traumatizing, and not a lot of those people would like to relive that trauma so having it be in a novel that they just want to sit down and read is messed up. Clearly Cormac uses his novels as a way of expressing himself and he might even use these as sort of therapy because he clearly has dark thoughts about the world, but he usually writes his novels with happy ending leading towards hope while its great that cormac uses these as therapy there are probably countless others who are just trying to escape their trauma.

Time and time again when it comes to Cormac McCarthy everybody talks about the senseless violence that takes place in most of his novels and how the use of this senseless violence is seen as tasteless and not necessary. Critics will always analyse the fact that cormac always had a pessimistic view when It came to the world and how it clearly shines in his novels like no country for old men where “The inexplicable evil of Chigurh and the equally inexplicable moral code practiced by Sheriff Bell may merely underscore the pointlessness of any discussion of morality,” - Cooper, Lydia. As well as in blood meridian the character that gets discussed the most out of all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, Judge Holden. He is nothing short of evil everything that he does in that book is evil and pointless now when reading blood meridian all of his actions leave a bad taste in your mouth and it's intentional, but it's not necessary, having a book devoid of morals is not good and can not be good on peoples mental health who read it. Cormac, having a very nihilistic point of view, wants to share it with the world, but some of it doesn't need to be.

 liminal spaces are in Cormac McCarthy's books, but they are more confusing then they are interesting, they don’t really do a lot for the plot except try to make things more complicated then they have to be a quote from a gale article written by Alex Engebreston talks about the unknown and liminal spaces in Cormac McCarthy’s novels and he says  "all dualisms of subject and object, inside and outside, will and representation or being and interpretation" you probably read that and don’t really know what it means and thats the point its confusing, Cormac McCarthy uses liminal spaces in what seems to be grounded novels so it just ends up being more confusing than thought provoking, while liminal spaces are a good Idea in science fiction it doesn’t really have a place in a more grounded book that talks about real life topics. To have a literary element in his novel be confusion it makes it come off as not well written, Cormac tries to play with the idea of liminality but ends up making it all too confusing while having to balance the plot of his novels. While it's intuitive for Cormac to visualize liminal spaces, in a book about cowboys during the Mexican American war, it doesn't really have a place in such a grounded piece of text.