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Topic: McCarthy's Western Novels
Thread: The Judge's Disappointment

Total messages for all days: 23

The Judge's Disappointment	no name entered	2/4/2001
If war is the ultimate game, and the decisions of fate are th only decisions that matter, then the kid in Blood Meridian is sure good at the game. Think about it for a minute. He travels alone from Tennessee to New Orleans at the age of 14, and survives. He's shot not once but twice at close range - and survives. He heads into Texas where he survives a fight with Toadvine. He survives the massacre of the filibusters by the Comanche. He survives imprisonment in Mexico. He survives the numerous scrapes the scalphunters get mixed up in, even when he is cut off, alone. Then he survives the Yuma uprising. It just goes on and on. I'm sure I've forgotten a bunch of examples of the kid's incredible ability to survive (ah, yes, the arrow in the leg - he survives, even though it becomes infected). Imagine the Judge's disappointment when the kid turns away from the game.

The Judge's Disappointment	jpt	2/5/2001
The kid never turns away from the game, the judge is never disappointed, fate has only one decision. Good or bad we may be, no matter, we will all die one day, and according to Holden - on that day he is the victor, and as long as we keep dying his victories are unending.

The Judge's Disappointment	Buck Mulligan	2/5/2001
There is a scene in Beloved where Paul D sits in chains, and he sees a rooster sitting on a chopping block, the rooster's pose having an air of disdain, taunting him. Paul D starts chuckling at the rooster, thinking "well, you think you're so smart, but you're soon for the chop." Then he realises that neither he nor the rooster have freedom from death, no one does. So they are equals in that. But in life, before death, the rooster has a freedom that Paul D doesn't. And he stops laughing. Perhaps Holden favours the idiot (to segue into another thread) because the idiot has a freedom in life that thinking men (with or without conscience) don't. And perhaps it is the kid's understanding of what he has done and his search for a backwoods absolution that titillates Holden. The kid's very survival is an irony, a joke and an insult to Holden all in one. He then responds the only way he can. Perhaps he is also just a player, but the one with the aces.

The Judge's Disappointment	Adam	2/5/2001
jpt, But the kid does turn away from the game. He refuses to kill Shelby, he refuses to kill the judge, he tries to help the "eldress" in the rocks, he tries to avoid killing Elrod. He becomes fed up with meanness. The judge's disappointment drips from their final conversation in the bar where the bear is slain. Buck, Interesting thought. The kid's freedom might be an insult to the judge, maybe so. I'm trying to get a handle on the judge's line (no book handy now, but it was said during their final chat in that tavern) when he says "our animosities were formed and waiting before we met", or something like that. It's almost as if the kid's reputation preceded him - the judge knew about him, had heard about him, this 14 year old survivor of scrapes of all sorts. And even at the outset, they're on opposite poles of something.

The Judge's Disappointment	peterb	2/6/2001
Adam, the kid fakes it, he slides and feints away from the hard pass, the fast ball, the bone tackle, the cement block, - until Elrod! The killing is the scoring, the scoring is the game. When you consider all the outright long sinning bastards that he has resisted killing (Shelby, Toadvine, Holden,) and then to lose it all by knocking off a punk kid like Elrod - a beginner, a kid with no instinct for survival, just a brash young tough talker with a gun who faces him off. No little wonder he later wanders into the everloving arms of the Coach, Holden! The last, of the True.

The Judge's Disappointment	Buck Mulligan	2/6/2001
Elrod came back to the man's campfire, in all probability, to kill him. He could have just moved on with the other orphaned children. But that was not in his nature. The man's shooting of Elrod was self defense, an inevitability. With Glanton's gang, killing was a prerequisite to survival. In the kid's 'second life' it is no longer, until Elrod (Kid Mark II) appears on the scene. Rick W posted many moons ago that the kid's killing of Elrod invoked the judge to reappear. I suppose almost like a monstrous genie in a bottle. The rest, just like Elrod's death, was then inevitable. Perhaps the reason why the judge 'says he will never die' is that we keep opening the bottle.

The Judge's Disappointment	Adam	2/6/2001
The problem with the invocation idea is that the judge winds up killing the kid - for what? For committing a murder? The judge advocates killing. Why would he turn against the kid for the kid's murder of Elrod. Makes no sense. The judge kills the kid because the kid resists the "selections" of history. The judge says as much in the bar. The kid is attempting to be merciful - that is the crime that the judge punishes him for. Pete, for me to believe that the kid "fakes it", you're gonna have to offer some textual support.

The Judge's Disappointment	peterb	2/7/2001
Adam, the only time the kid ever loosened up and spoke at length about himself and his poor circumstances, about his monumental travails and the distance from home his sorry travels had taken him; the only time he offered anyone any charitable assistance was with a dead husk of a woman stuck in a cleft in a rock. Fake contrition! He walked around town in a black hat and with a bible under his arm. Fake conversion! Buck, the kid had been wandering and killing and robbing and raping and surviving for decades, then he killed a child. His measure of compassion for the deluded boy was the distance he removed himself from his campfire. Holden was never so cold blooded.

The Judge's Disappointment	Adam	2/7/2001
Pete, You protest too much. The dead woman in the rocks. Is it fake contrition if he doesn't KNOW she's dead. Is the intent to be kind subverted if the target of kindness turns out to be incapable of receiving kindness? How do you know it's fake? The kid couldn't read the Bible, but kept it still. Why carry it around? Almost like he's using it as a sort of talisman to ward off evil. Certainly he's not running revivals, a la Rev. Greene. Given the fact that we never get into the kid's head, you can't say with any certainty that his conversion is "fake". His removal of self from the fire - where should he have removed himself to, and how many times is it required that he remove himself? Given the times (post-Civil war western US of A) such encounters as the one with Elrod wouldn't have been rare? Is he to run every time? Holden was never so cold blooded? Come on...the judge slices a child's throat after playing with the child for a day - a child who offered Holden no threat at all.

The Judge's Disappointment	malachi	2/7/2001
Buck: ANNOUNCING THE 2001 NATIONAL JAMES JOYCE CONFERENCE EXTREME JOYCE/READING ON THE EDGE Berkeley, California 1 - 7 July 2001 Looking forward to seeing you, please bring the wife

The Judge's Disappointment	Buck Mulligan	2/7/2001
I thought the kid/man removed himself from the campfire so he wouldn't be shot in his sleep. He was a touch too savvy to suffer that fate.

The Judge's Disappointment	Chip	2/7/2001
"In his cell he began to speak with a strange urgency of things few men have seen in a lifetime and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered by the acts of blood in which he had participated" (305). I'm with Adam on his reading of the kid. As a man, he gives Elrod fair warning, tells Elrod's friends to take him away. "You aim to shoot me?" Elrod asks him. "I aim to try to keep from it," he answers (321). Then he tells the others, "You keep him away from me, he said. I see him back here I'll kill him" (322). He is wise to sleep away from the fire. When Elrod comes back, the man calls out to him, "I'm right here." Elrod shoots first at him and then the man fires back (we assume, since McC doesn't describe the shooting to us). It seems to me one has work really hard to turn the kid/man into a mean assassin in this scene.

The Judge's Disappointment	sara	2/7/2001
Im doing a paper on blood meridian, and i just need some opinions. do you think that the judge represents the devil and the book is basically about the kids journey through hell? and is the judge the cause of all the problems the group encounters on their journey?

The Judge's Disappointment	peterb	2/8/2001
The lad was armed with a buffalo rifle and standing foolish looking at the ashes of the Kid's fire long before dawn, he called into the surrounding darkness, he called. ' I knowed you'd be hid out. ' And the kid used all his craft to centre his forsight in the milled groove of the framestrap and holding the piece so he swung it through the dark of the trees with both hands to the darker shape of the visitor. Then he justified killing the boy by startling him into a wild shot with his call from the black night. ' I'm right here.' Mindless violence.

The Judge's Disappointment	Chip	2/8/2001
I don't know what else you want the kid to do. I guess he could have picked up and moved on. It's mindless violence because Elrod insists on it. He's the one who comes back to the campfire after being warned several times that to do so would result in his death. I guess this is an example of each of us having our minds set on our particular reading of the kid and the scene, but I just dont see the textual evidence. Elrod's a fool and the kid isn't.

The Judge's Disappointment	Adam	2/8/2001
Pete, If the kid/man hadn't shot Elrod, do you expect Elrod would've let it go? At what point is the kid/man allowed to defend himself?

The Judge's Disappointment	peterb	2/8/2001
Adam, I don't see any self defence in it at all. The kid trapped him like a fox does a chicken... Look at the big picture, a fifteen year old boy with a bad attitude and a big old buff gun up against a cunning and long experienced hunter and killer.. No wonder the kid later walked into Holdens' arms, .. killing Elrod must have been hard to live with.

The Judge's Disappointment	Buck Mulligan	2/8/2001
Now, in a technical sense, if McCarthy hadn't had the kid/man kill Elrod, then he'd had to have had Elrod kill the kid/man 'cos that's the way that whole scene (and Elrod's character) was set up. It was going to be one or the other. And if the kid had died at the campfire, the book would have been robbed of the judge's final speeches to the kid/man and dance, which were crucial to the theme of the whole story. There are moments in the book that set the kid up as either a heartless killer or perhaps more a 'thoughtless' killer, but I can't see that the Elrod incident can be read as one of them. Maybe part of the judge's joy at the end is proving to the kid that he (and we) will end up killing whether we want to/try to or not. Reminiscent of the "Because I am a snake" sequence in the movie Natural Born Killers.

The Judge's Disappointment	Adam	2/8/2001
Pete, I'll bet it was hard to live with. He regrets it, would've avoided it if he could...and there's the difference between Holden and the kid. The kid's "judgement against the selections made by history" - his pity, conscience, regret - is what the judge hates the most. They're really quite different. Holden knows it, so does the kid. It seems funny to me that 2 characters so similar in their ability to survive against overwhelming odds have such different perspectives on regret and pity. Also funny that McCarthy chooses to give the heartless character the unconquerable intellect, while the pity-ing character can barely carry on a conversation. Is speech NOT a prerequisite when "God's voice" is heard even in the least of things? Maybe the kid doesn't need to talk to know what's wrong and right. Is the kid's attunement to that voice from elsewhere, and his adherence to what he thinks is right, enough to give the book a sense of victory at the end? If the judge rules down here, does adherence to rules set elsewhere matter?

The Judge's Disappointment	peterb	2/8/2001
Adam, I understand that, - but I always reckoned that the end victory was Holden's... Some piece of work ain't it? - I guess this is an example of each of us having our minds set on our particular reading of the kid and the scene - says Chip rightly. .. but did the kid move away from the fire to hide? - or to ambush? - stick with it Andy, plenty of apples in the barrel son.

The Judge's Disappointment	tom c.	2/10/2001
The kid moved away from the fire out of self protection. If he had not done so, Elrod would have killed him. He didn't want to kill Elrod, he said as much---"I aim to keep from it" . You could also read into the episode that the kid truly regretted having to shoot Elrod. He said, "You would have died anyway." As if he were rationalizing to himself that Elrod was already doomed and if the Kid hadn't killed him someone else would have.He also put up with alot of insulting remarks from Elrod which he might not have done 30 years prior........... Speaking of the Kid's hum anity, he was the only one who would help get the arrow out of David Brown's leg. What was that, if not humanity? He certainly had nothing to gain, (and perhaps much to lose).

The Judge's Disappointment	no name entered	2/11/2001
Elrod certainly did everything humanly possible to provoke the kid into killing him. Ultimately though, the kid chose to stay at that particular place to kip knowing fully well that he may have to kill a fifteen year old boy or be killed by that boy if he did so. Expecting trouble he took the hobbles off his horse, saddled it, and lay down in the dark. Why would the kid after all he’s been through take such a stand against a fifteen year old boy 30 odd years his junior ? Makes me wonder if in the boy he saw himself, and perhaps his ending the boy’s life ("You would have died anyway.") is somehow tied into the inevitability of the judge’s terrible embrace at the end of the book. I can’t quite think it all out. When riding with Glanton the kid displayed moments of humanity and yet participated in slaughter and now 30 years later he displays leniency to Elrod and then sets up to end Elrod’s life. Still showing traits of clemency – now that’s disappointing.

The Judge's Disappointment	peterb	2/11/2001
Is there any other instance in the book where the kid engaged with someone for as long as he did with Elrod?

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