Outer Dark

Cormac McCarthy was one of six children in his large Irish Catholic family. Born in 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island, he spent most of his early life in Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer. McCarthy was an altar boy and attended a private Catholic school. He was, however, uninterested in formal education, preferring a plethora of hobbies. He discovered an interest in writing while attending college at the University of Tennessee, and a passion for reading during a short stint with the U.S. Air Force. After completing his military service, he returned to the University of Tennessee for a degree in English literature that he never completed. McCarthy’s early career was marked by personal and professional struggle. His first marriage, to Lee Holleman, ended when she left him shortly after the birth of their son Cullen. He was frequently broke, and it took him years to get his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, accepted for publication in 1965. However, grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and elsewhere kept him afloat and allowed him to travel Europe, where he met his second wife and wrote his second novel, Outer Dark, which was published in 1968. McCarthy was known as an eccentric, frequently turning down lucrative speaking gigs in order to focus on his writing even when his family was in abject poverty. He didn’t rise to critical acclaim until he was nearly 60, with the publication of the award-winning All the Pretty Horses in 1992. His 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road won a Pulitzer. McCarthy’s later success caused a reevaluation of his earlier work, particularly 1985’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, which is now widely considered his best work and acclaimed as one of the greatest American novels ever written. During his lengthy career, McCarthy penned 12 novels, two plays, five screenplays, and several short stories. His works center in the American West and Appalachia and frequently engage with themes of theodicy, nihilism, violence, dislocation, and loneliness. In his later years, McCarthy became heavily involved with the Santa Fe Institute, where he was one of the few non-scientists involved in the institute’s work. He died in 2023 just a few weeks shy of his 90th birthday.

The breakup of a family, a man’s inability to acknowledge his own mistakes, and the loss of a child feature heavily in Outer Dark in ways that resonate with the author’s biography. Critics and McCarthy scholars frequently point to the circumstances in the author’s life when contextualizing Outer Dark. It was written during the years between when McCarthy completed his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, and when he was able to get it published, a period marked by financial insecurity and doubt. Concurrently, his brief marriage to fellow writer Lee Holleman ended in an acrimonious divorce and she took their only child, Cullen, then still a baby, with her when she moved across the country. Written in the early 1960s, the novel’s themes also intersect with contemporaneous world events. Motifs of wandering and questions about the meaning (or meaninglessness of life) in the novel echo the artistic and cultural project of the Beat Generation subculture, which flourished in America in the 1950s. Additionally, the novel’s evocation of pointless, meaningless violence anticipates questions about the United States’ involvement in Cold War Era proxy wars with the Soviet Union, particularly the Korean War (1950-1953)—during which McCarthy served in the United States Air Force—and the Vietnam War. This latter conflict began in 1955, but the United States grew steadily more involved across the 1960s under the leadership of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, culminating in the involvement of nearly 9 million servicemen and women and the deaths of more than 58,000 of those individuals.

The imagery in the Outer Dark draws heavily on the Christian Bible, specifically the accounts of Jesus’s life presented in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The title of the book comes from a parable related in Matthew 22, and the episode in which Culla Holme watches a herd of hogs panic and stampede of a cliff draws on the accounts presented in Matthew 8 and Luke 8 of Jesus casting demons out of two afflicted men and into a herd of pigs. Some interpretations of the novel have further seen associations between the Holy Family (Mary, Joseph, and Jesus) with the unholy family of Culla, Rinthy, and the child and between the Three Kings and the trio of murderous strangers. The language and style of McCarthy’s Southern Gothic novel are also heavily indebted to the works of William Faulkner. Among Faulkner’s works, Outer Dark is perhaps most similar to As I Lay Dying (1930) with which it shares a depiction of familial strife and alienation; motifs of wandering, blindness, and the impotence of human effort; and a gritty depiction of rural southern poverty. The themes of alienation, desperation, evil, punishment, violence, and hopelessness which McCarthy explores in Outer Dark recur in his later works as well, particularly Child of God (published in 1973), which follows the wanderings of social outcast, necrophiliac, and arsonist Lester Ballard. McCarthy’s Bood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, published in 1985 and generally considered to be McCarthy’s best work, follows the meandering journey of the Kid, a runaway from Tennessee who gets mixed up with a band of desperate and violent men in the context of the Mexican-American War and the conquest and settling of Indigenous lands in the 1840s and 1850s.