Abstrakt
Cormac McCarthy's fifth novel, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, describes a story of a gang of scalphunters hired by the government in the era of the westward expansion. McCarthy's vision of history and advancement of American civilization does not correspond with the nationwide myth of victorious process claiming the promised land.
His revisionist view narrates a different story, a story of conquest, destruction, and environmental catastrophe. The novel's landscape imagery destabilizes the ethos of the West and the intersections of nature and culture become mementos of the omnipresent violence eternally captured in time as the landscape itself becomes a means of narration.
Employing the discourse of the new western history, particularly its attention to remnants of civilization co-constructing the landscape, combined with the ecocritical principle of human accountability to nature, this paper intends to demonstrate the significance of landscape and places in Blood Meridian which exceeds from a mere setting to an inseparable element of the narrative as it becomes a landscape of national memory of drastic conquest and trauma.