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.
Character Analysis
Culla Holme
Culla Holme is one of the novel’s two protagonists. There is almost no physical description of Culla; instead, McCarthy’s characterization focuses on Culla’s guilt and his violent, deviant impulses, symbolized both by his shadow and by the trio. Culla never escapes his guilt or these impulses: He begins the story fleeing responsibility for his crimes, and he ends the story doing the same, having covered endless ground in the interim. Culla’s character arc is a circle.
Culla often appears in shadow and is described as being chained to his own shadow. While Culla is spurned for the darkness that swathes him, Rinthy is welcomed for the light that surrounds her. When Rinthy goes into labor, Culla’s shadow appears as a sinful stain on his soul: “the man’s shadow pooled at his feet, a dark stain in which he stood” (13). Culla’s guilt follows him in the form of his shadow, condemning him to struggle futilely to escape it. In Preston Flats, he appears “manacled to a shadow that struggled grossly in the dust” (124). Culla’s guilt differentiates him from the trio, which personifies the shadowy parts of his psyche. Unlike the trio, which embraces its malevolence, Culla pretends such violence isn’t in his nature. He wants at once to be seen as a good man (this is why he’s indignant when people are suspicious of him) and to indulge his violent, anomic impulses (to impregnate his sister, to get revenge on those who slight him). He wants to be rid of his child without having to kill it outright. The bearded leader taunts Culla for trapping himself in this quandary. In slaughtering the child, the leader confronts Culla with the consequence of leaving him to die. While Culla doesn’t wield the knife, he’s effectively orders the child’s death by first leaving it to die and then tacitly approving the execution. Shadow and darkness symbolize both Culla’s guilt and his rootlessness, which are in turn personified by the violent, shadowy trio.
In the allegory of Outer Dark, Culla’s fatal moral flaw is his flight from the world. This fatal flaw is never resolved; anagnorisis eludes him to the end. In avoiding responsibility for impregnating his sister, leaving their child to die, and lying about his actions, Culla cuts himself off from the world. This highlights the themes of The Curse of Cain and Suffering in Outer Darkness. Even before Rinthy gives birth, Culla ignores her needs, described as “not listening, never listening” (9). This willful ignorance continues into the denouement, in which Culla ignores the key to his suffering contained in the blind man’s words: Culla is the man in the blind man’s story who cries out in confusion, metaphorically blind to the source of his affliction. Throughout the novel, Culla repeats that he doesn’t need anything from anyone, priding himself on his independence. He maintains this response to the very end, when the blind man asks if he needs anything. This time, the question has an overtly spiritual meaning: The man is asking if Culla needs help praying for his salvation. Culla doesn’t think he needs to be saved from anything by anyone. This mulish independence—which amounts to a kind of self-imposed solitary confinement—defines Culla.
Rinthy Holme
Rinthy Holme, 19, is an innocent in a world consumed by darkness. She first appears nine months pregnant, about to give birth to a child by her brother, isolated from the world in their remote cabin. Culla, who is more worldly, controls Rinthy. However, even under Culla, Rinthy is her own person. She has wants and needs, asking for a fire (“I sure do admire a good fire of the evenin”) (9), for the midwife, and for Culla to clean the window, so she has a view while she recuperates. Without an inner monologue (which is true of all the characters), Rinthy is characterized through dialogue, appearance, and action. She wears the same blue dress throughout the story; its deterioration measures the toll of her quest.
Rinthy’s innocence doesn’t transcend the darkness that surrounds her; instead, she appears as a sort of nymph whose purpose is to struggle with the outer darkness. She’s associated with birds, flowers, and animals, and through most of the novel, symbolizes Love as Humanity’s Saving Grace. Near the beginning of her quest, she’s described as “Emaciate and blinking […] she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings […] into the agony of sunlight” (93). This combination of destitution, blessedness, and suffering defines Rinthy. The image suggests Rinthy’s dual nature: she is an innocent from a better, spiritual world, who struggles reluctantly through a fallen, corporeal world.
Unlike Culla, Rinthy is a dynamic character. Her search for her child brings her into the world and out of the isolated cabin that defined her. She changes dramatically when the tinker refuses to return her child. In his refusal, the tinker snuffs out Rinthy’s hope, the force that has animated her quest through the landscape of outer darkness. Later, Rinthy is a shell of her former self, “mute, shuffling, wooden” (213). She’s given up on her search for her child and thereby becomes lifeless. The death and darkness she travels through have now consumed her. The birds and butterflies—symbols of hope—that once attended Rinthy in her quest are now absent. The only winged creature that appears at the farm is the moth the farmer remorselessly crushes, just as the world, and specifically the tinker, crushes Rinthy’s spirit.
Rinthy resurrects herself from this despair. Her decision to continue her quest attests to the depth of her hope and the strength of her resolve. In her final scene, she appears more destitute than before, prostrated by her quest, yet not broken: “half wild and haggard in her shapeless sundrained cerements, yet delicate as any fallow doe” (228). Rinthy is a portrait of the suffering that accumulates in innocents in a world consumed by darkness.
The Trio
The trio, or “grim triune” (129), shadows Culla through the nebulous Appalachian landscape like guardian demons. The trio is comprised of the towering, black-bearded, unnamed leader, a rifle-toting man named Harmon, and a nameless man who is nonspeaking. Unlike the leader, who probes the existential depths of Culla’s predicament to make him squirm, Harmon and the man who is nonspeaking are content with physical violence and intimidation. The leader wears a black suit robbed from a grave, making him look like a preacher, though the suit’s ill fit reveals his deception. He is a commanding presence, persuading a mob to follow him and lynch two innocent millhands, and browbeating Culla into debasing himself. Although completely amoral, the leader nonetheless functions as Culla’s conscience, challenging him to admit the full extent of his crimes. The leader voices the guilty thoughts Culla represses, illuminating what Culla tries to hide.
Shadows are associated with the darkness and evil of the trio to the extent that they often appear only as shadows. In the first italicized vignette, when the trio camps and makes a fire, they appear flattened, “their shapes mov[ing] in a nameless black ballet” (4) like shadows. They again appear as dimensionless silhouettes when Culla first encounters them on the riverbank: “the fire behind them projecting their shapes outward into soaring darkness and with no dimension to them at all” (162). Later, as they taunt Culla by the fire, the leader is again flattened in a trick of perception: “the scene compressed into a kind of depthlessness so that the black woods beyond them hung across his eyes oppressively and the man seemed to be seated in the fire itself, cradling the flames to his body as if there were something there beyond all warming” (181). The frequent depiction of the trio as dimensionless shapes suggest that they are tied to Culla as his shadow: Just as Culla cannot escape his shadow, he can’t escape the trio, who shadows him along his ill-fated, futile journey.
The Tinker
The unnamed tinker is an itinerant salesman who hawks whiskey, pornography, and general provisions. He is described as “a small gnomic creature wreathed in a morass of grizzled hair […] with bland gray eyes” (5). Even when free of the cart he has pulled for 40 years, he remains “bowed in his posture of drayage” (190), a dray being a cart used to transport heavy loads. Hawking illicit wares ostracizes him, and he lives in isolation without family or friends. To Rinthy, he laments what it’s like to be alone in the world, abused by those he encounters: “I been rocked and shot at and whipped and kicked and dogbit from one end of this state to the other and you cain’t pay that back” (195). In Rinthy, the tinker finds someone to hate for his lifelong misfortune. In this rant, he reveals his true motive behind keeping Rinthy’s baby. He claims that Rinthy is an unfit mother, when in reality he just wants her child. The baby is a symbol of innocence amid the ruin and sin of the tinker’s life, someone the tinker can possess to ward against his loneliness, and maybe someone he dreams of raising as the son he never had. This is why the tinker is so angry to discover that the baby is a child of incest; the baby, too, is stained by the depravity that defines his life.
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