Previous
Alliteration
Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Key Examples in Blood Meridian
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Birth of the Kid :
The novel begins with the kid's father describing the birth of the kid, which is an allusion to Jesus and the Bible and foreshadows the role of religion in Blood Meridian:
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Reverend's Murder:
In Chapter 1, when the Judge murders Reverend Green by lying to the congregants to whom the Reverend was preaching, he foreshadows the religious tension that is central to the novel in an allusion to Judas and Jesus:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an imposter. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises.... Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible.... This is him, cried the reverend, sobbing. This is him. The devil. Here he stands.
Related Themes:
Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Argonauts and Plague :
Imprisoned with Toadvine and Grannyrat Chambers, the kid witnesses people migrating south in search of gold. McCarthy makes use of a simile in order to compare these "goldseekers" to a plague:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague. They nodded or spoke to the prisoners and dropped tobacco and coins in the street beside them.
Chapter 10
Explanation and Analysis—Et In Arcadia Ego:
Tobin describes stumbling across the Judge in the middle of the desert, including the fact that the Judge had on his person little other than a rifle with a name alluding to a Poussin painting:
Unlock with LitCharts A+He had with him that selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german silver and the name that he’d give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin: Et In Arcadia Ego. A reference to the lethal in it. Common enough for a man to name his gun.
Related Themes:
Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Burning Bush :
After the kid refrains from killing an injured Shelby as Glanton had ordered him to do, he is separated from Tate as members of General Elias's army attempt to shoot them. With no horse, supplies, or allies, the kid stumbles across a lone tree burning in the desert, an allusion to the burning bush of the Bible:
Unlock with LitCharts A+It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon.
Related Themes:
