"You didnt give me words" - Religious Subversion and Secular Philosophy in Cormac McCarthy

Abstract

This project attempts to track and delineate a consistent subversion of religion and faith, as well as a vindication of fundamental principles of secular philosophy in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. I identify three interconnected vehicles of religious subversion and secular philosophy in McCarthy's fiction. There are direct, characterized representations of the secular worldview. These characters explicitly relate a secular, practically Nietzschean philosophy, but are themselves presented as divine figures. There are also “false prophets,” characters who express traditional Christian or deistic relationships with morality and reality that are essentially instances of dramatic irony. Finally, there are “true prophets,” characters who undertake spiritual journeys that lead to paradoxical moments of epistemological revelation that at once subvert religion, and validate secular principles of the human relationship to reality.