Cormac McCarthy, perhaps the greatest American novelist since Faulkner, passed away on Tuesday. His fiction adeptly pinpoints the most profound aspects of American culture and identity, arguably outperforming the work of many sociologists.
McCarthy was interested in the hardest questions about human existence, which produced in his work the depth common to all fiction widely considered “great.” This is certainly not the first time I have been struck by the richness of his work.
Many critics understand his books to be bleak and hopeless, characterized by a dark and loveless worldview. But I find in his novels an abiding love for his characters. Even as these fictional individuals struggle with their lives and with one another, they nonetheless affirm the themes of basic moral commitment, strong values, and decency.
A full exploration of this topic would require a lengthy treatise. But perhaps the best evidence for the case can be more efficiently illustrated with examples from his prose. Here, McCarthy so carefully and lovingly documented the language — along with the homespun wisdom and humor within it — of what we used to be able to call without objection “the common man.”
The outstanding characters in his novels — John Grady Cole, Billy Parham, Llewelyn Moss, Sheriff Bell, and many others — speak the endearing popular idiom of a southern American dialect and display a related moral sensibility that is widely disparaged by our contemporary cultural elite.
“Rednecks” and “hillbillies” talk like this, the elites chuckle to one another
