50 pages • 1 hour read
Cormac McCarthyOuter Dark
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Cormac McCarthy and Southern Gothic Fiction
Outer Dark, McCarthy’s second novel, combines the use of colloquial dialogue from his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, with the ornate, poetic style he later uses in his magnum opus, Blood Meridian. At this early point in his career (McCarthy wrote Outer Dark between 1962 and 1964), McCarthy draws on the Southern Gothic tradition of literature, such as the work of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Outer Dark has all the hallmarks of Southern Gothic: macabre violence, ubiquitous decay, and the incursion of the supernatural (the trio) into the real world. It also shares the trope of the villain in disguise with O’Connor’s fiction, confusing the boundary between good and evil; for example, the leader of the trio wears a stolen black suit that makes him look like a minister. This disguise disarms the snake hunter so that the trio can disembowel him. The disguise also lends the leader authority before the mob that follows him to lynch two innocent millhands for the murder of Squire Salter (whom the trio murdered). In the eyes of the mob, the leader of the trio is someone upholding justice, or at least enacting retribution, not the villain he truly is.
Unlike much other Southern Gothic fiction, Outer Dark doesn’t focus on the history of slavery, segregation, and racism in the antebellum South, though these issues appear peripherally. McCarthy forgoes focus on a particular point in the history of the South in favor of conjuring a nebulous setting for his grim, antediluvian allegory. This creates a timeless story about the struggle between good and evil, light and darkness, more Manichaean than Judeo-Christian. One of the devices he uses to create this effect is poetic language and archaic, biblical vocabulary. As in Blood Meridian, this ornate style suits his material, giving it the transcendent quality of allegory.
Literary Context: Faulkner’s Light in August
Outer Dark is heavily influenced by William Faulkner’s 1932 Southern Gothic novel Light in August. Faulkner’s novel follows a pregnant woman, Lena Grove, in her search for the man, Lucas Burch, who impregnated her. Lena is helped in her search by a man who falls in love with her, Byron Bunch. McCarthy’s protagonist Rinthy Holme is like Lena Grove—except she doesn't have someone helping her along the way, and she meets a fate much more horrific than Grove’s. Both novels also allude to the Bible. Light in August’s 21 chapters follow the 21 chapters of the Gospel of St. John, refracting them through a Gothic lens; McCarthy’s novel takes as its theme the outer darkness (lake of fire) referenced in the Gospel of Matthew, imagining what it would be like to suffer in this hellish realm.
Outer Dark takes up Faulkner’s themes in Light in August of alienation, evil, and retribution. The protagonists in Light in August are social outcasts. The inhabitants of the central town of the story, Jefferson, spend years trying to expel two of them, a carpetbagger named Joanna Burden and a disgraced reverend named Gail Hightower. Culla is also persecuted by xenophobic people; however, unlike Burden and Hightower, he has no just cause or moral ground on which to stand. A white woman, Burden is persecuted because she comes from a family of Northern abolitionists. Hightower is persecuted because his wife commits suicide (a scandal in the parochial town of Jefferson), and he refuses to relinquish the ministry.
The closest analogue to Culla in Faulkner’s novel is Joe Christmas, an angry loner who travels from place to place in fear that someone will discover his mixed ancestry; an orphan, he believes one of his parents was Black, but he passes as white. Both Culla and Christmas are condemned to wander, both are angry about their status, and both are pursued for violent crimes. It’s ambiguous whether Christmas or his partner in bootlegging, Burch, murdered Burden. What’s clear is that, because Burch tells the police that Christmas is Black, they pursue him for the crime instead of Burch. Furthermore, Burch doesn’t stand trial; instead, a white vigilante murders and castrates him. Conversely, Culla is persecuted for what he’s done, not who he is. Instead of focusing on the racial context of crime, Outer Dark focuses on the spiritual context, thematizing Culla’s sin and guilt.
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