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.
Pages 77-146Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 77-94 Summary
Culla meets a drunken beekeeper along the road. They share a drink as they continue toward a town called Cheatham. Culla refuses the beekeeper’s offer to trade the nice stolen boots to replace the man’s boots, which are falling apart. The beekeeper asks Culla why he’s traveling without a destination; Culla says he’s looking for his sister.
Cheatham appears abandoned. The beekeeper directs Culla to the store for work before continuing on without saying goodbye. From the storekeeper, Culla learns that everyone is at the church graveyard. Soon an armed procession appears, escorting a wagon carrying three coffins disinterred by an unknown grave thief. The procession stops in the square, where hundreds of people gather to look inside the opened coffins: One coffin holds both a desiccated, naked man and the half-decapitated corpse of the Black sexton of the graveyard. It’s implied that the grave robbers staged this macabre tableaux. Someone remarks that the grave thief will likely be wearing the black suit stolen from the desiccated body.
The storekeeper whispers to the sheriff about Culla. As the deputies approach Culla, he flees into an alley. The deputies pursue him through town, across fields, and into the woods, where they lose him. After night falls, Culla returns to the road.
Culla walks for two days, eating nothing but pilfered turnips; nonetheless he bathes, shaves, and washes his shirt. At a farm, a man contracts Culla to paint his barn roof. He allows Culla to sleep in the barn before starting. The next morning, Culla begins.
On the fourth day, Culla spots the four armed deputies approaching. He stumbles down the ladder and runs around the barn only for one of them to hit him over the back with a wooden slat. Culla gets up and flees through the pigsty. A boar attacks the deputies, but as Culla crests a hill, one of the deputy shoots him in the back with shotgun pellets. Continuing into the woods, Culla slides down an embankment and lands face first in a creek. Unable to rise, he drinks, vomits, then drinks again.
Pages 95-117 Summary
In the fourth italicized vignette, the leader of the trio makes his way through a group of people gathered around Salter’s body. The leader wears a dusty black linen suit that is too small for his large frame. His boots are ragged, his black hair and beard long and snarled. He leads the people out to find the murderer. In the morning, the bodies of two itinerant millhands hang from a tree outside of town.
Back on the road alone, Rinthy spends the night under a bridge. In the morning she washes in the creek and continues along the road. Coming upon a well-kept house, Rinthy asks the woman there for work. After she’s invited inside, where a child is crying, Rinthy begins lactating through her dress and leaves. On the edge of town, she sees the two millhands hanged in the tree; she wonders how something so gruesome can exist amid the birdsong of a beautiful summer day.
A farmer (later identified as a man named Bud) catches Rinthy eating some of the old turnips from his field. She tells him her story about hunting the tinker, and he invites her in for lunch with his wife. Rinthy finds his wife churning butter to sell; the woman refuses Rinthy’s offer of help. They talk, and it emerges that that the woman’s five children all died. Rinthy is sympathetic.
When Bud comes in to eats, he and his wife start fighting. Bud starts throwing butter, and Rinthy flees, hearing the woman screaming in the background. Miles down the road, the ravenous Rinthy finds a shack inhabited by a wizened woman. The woman professes her hatred of snakes and tells Rinthy about the near-half-century she’s lived in the shack. As darkness falls, the woman invites Rinthy in for dinner. The shack is crammed full of firewood, and there’s a sow sleeping in a corner.
Noticing that Rinthy is lactating, the woman accuses Rinthy of drowning her baby. She compares Rinthy to the sow, which ate all but one of its babies. Rinthy explains that her brother sold her baby to a tinker. The woman knows of a tinker, but Rinthy doesn’t know whether he’s the one she’s hunting. The woman advises Rinthy to grease her nipples to prevent chafing. They talk about the hanged millhands; they both admit to being scared of being alone. Rinthy says, “I always was scared. Even when they wasn’t nobody bein murdered nowheres” (117).
Pages 118-129 Summary
After returning to the road, Culla comes to a cabin, where he asks the old man on the porch for a drink; the man responds that he wouldn’t turn Satan himself away. The man asks Culla to stay and talk a while because he won’t be able to make it to the next town by dark. The man is a hunter. Inside his cabin overgrown with mold and fungus, he shows off an eight-foot-long rattlesnake skin and a massive four-gauge shotgun he used to hunt geese. He recounts that his neighbor, a trapper, was killed by a rattlesnake. The trapper kneeled in prayer after being bitten, and his body was found paralyzed by the venom in this position, forcing the coroner to use a maul to flatten his body into a coffin.
The hunter thinks that despite their association with evil, snakes must contain some good because Geechee doctors use them in medicine; even preachers go to Geechee doctors for treatment. The hunter’s philosophical musings annoy Culla, who thinks only of continuing along the road. Suddenly, Culla hallucinates the paralyzed trapper: “The praying minktrapper materialized for him out of the glare of the sun like some trembling penitent boiling in the heat” (126). Spitting, Culla rejects the man’s offer to apprentice as a snake hunter and leaves.
Pages 130-146 Summary
Culla walks in the dark to the next town, Preston Flats, which is ominously deserted. He hurries into a field, where he gathers hardened corn kernels and sleeps.
The next morning, Culla arrives at a turpentine camp. The gruff overseer doesn’t need laborers but directs Culla to a man named Clark, a lawman, auctioneer, and storeowner in the nearby town. Culla washes and shaves in a creek. When he arrives in town, he’s already sweated through his shirt again; it’s the height of summer. A man repairing a wagon wheel tells Culla that Clark is preparing for an auction. With the extreme heat, Culla appears unwell, and the man asks if he’s sick; Culla replies that he’s just down on his luck: “Everbody’s subject to get in a ditch sometime or anothern […] I ain’t lookin for nobody to be sorry for me” (136). Culla waits for Clark at his nearby store.
While waiting, Culla chews the corn he collected. Disgusted, he spits the paste into the street. A man named Bud coming around the corner starts yelling, accusing Culla of having cholera. It’s implied that Bud is the man who invited Rinthy to lunch only to get in a fight with his wife. Bud claims to shoot anyone with cholera on sight because it killed his five children but spared his wife. Culla argues that he isn’t sick.
Clark appears in his auction cart. He’s gigantic and wears a dirty white suit. Bud is furious because Clark hanged the millhands in Bud’s field as a warning to other criminals. Clark dismisses Bud. Unimpressed with Culla, Clark only gives him work digging graves for the millhands with a broken pick.
In the church graveyard, Culla finds two Black men digging a grave for Salter. As instructed by Clark, Culla digs outside the graveyard. He finishes late at night and finds no one at Clark’s store, leaving him to sleep by a haystack outside of town. Just before dawn, he awakes, sensing an ominous presence on the road: “He listened for dogs to bark down along the road, but no dogs barked. […] the morning came up in the east in a pale accretion of light heralded by no cock, no waking birds (145). After some time, he walks back into town. On a crest, he spots vultures circling the hanged millhands. There is now another man wearing a dirty white suit hanged next to them. Culla finds the town deserted, Clark’s mule and auction cart abandoned. Frightened, he flees.
Pages 77-146 Analysis
McCarthy favors showing over telling, leaving the reader to notice the clues that stitch the narrative together. In the fourth italicized vignette, the black suit stolen from one of the coffins appears on the leader of the trio, identifying him as the grave robber. The squire from whom Culla steals is the old man Mr. Salter, who’s found murdered in the fourth vignette. The dirty white suit of the third man Culla sees hanged identifies him as Clark, who’s introduced in these same clothes. It’s implied that, just as the trio leads the lynch mob of the itinerant millhands in the fourth vignette, they also lynch Clark. Just before this, Clark had criticized Culla for being lazy and inexperienced and then gives him menial work that, in this racist milieu, is usually only done by Black men. Clark, who is the sheriff in addition to his other roles, rules the town: The man repairing the wagon wheel tells Culla that the county is full of Clarks, implying that Clark is the patriarch of a large family. Clark owns an auction house, a store, and is implied to own other businesses in town. His size reflects this outsize stature: he’s “so huge that the mule and the wagon which carried him looked absurd, like a toy rig in a circus bearing some soiled and monolithic clown” (139). He lords his stature over Culla, who’s embittered by their interaction. In lynching Clark, the trio enacts Culla’s unconscious fantasy of revenge, slaying the man who disparaged him. By leaving all of these connections hazy, McCarthy evokes Culla’s sense that he’s being shadowed by unseen force executing his ill intentions. This highlights the theme of The Curse of Cain that typifies Culla’s experiences.
Another of these hazy connections is that the farmer who invites Rinthy to lunch is Bud, who later accuses Culla of having cholera. This is hinted by the fact that Bud doesn’t have any butter to sell to Clark (he threw it all at his wife) and that, as his wife told Rinthy, all five of his children died. Bud is a foil to both Rinthy and Culla, exemplifying the contrasting ways people treat them. Although Bud finds Rinthy stealing turnips from his field, her guilelessness softens him and he invites her to lunch. In contrast, Bud threatens to shoot Culla over an absurd misapprehension—that his spit corn paste is a sign of cholera. Despite the fact this obviously isn’t true, Culla nonetheless raises Bud’s ire, showing that Culla brings the worst out of people. Rinthy amplifies the good in people whereas Culla amplifies the evil. This contrast highlights Rinthy as representing Love as Humanity’s Saving Grace.
The repetition of the snake hunter’s line at the end of his chapter has a tragicomic effect. The snake hunter tells Culla that he “wouldn’t turn Satan away for a drink” (118), then repeats this line at the end of his chapter (128). Initially, this line characterizes the hunter as kind person willing to help even people he thinks evil. After it becomes clear the hunter is desperate for company, this line adopts a humorous undertone: He’s so thirsty for company that he’d welcome even Satan. This highlights the theme of Suffering in Outer Darkness. This desperation, which annoys Culla, subsequently dooms the hunter: He welcomes the satanic trio, which repays his trust by murdering him. The juxtaposition of these visits suggests a connection between the two. With his offer to apprentice Culla, the hunter threatens to deliver Culla from his endless wandering. As the devils guarding Culla’s sentence, the “grim triune” (129) neutralizes this threat, like God exacting sevenfold punishment on those who would harm Cain.
The biblical nature of Culla’s punishment also manifests in the novel’s setting. Every town that Culla enters is desolate, as if destroyed by some calamity; however, these same towns and surroundings appear welcoming and beautiful when Rinthy enters them. This contrast in narrative description suggests that Culla wreaks a path of destruction, bringing the worst out of the landscape and its people. When Culla enters Cheatham it initially appears abandoned. Preston Flats looks “not only uninhabited but deserted, as if plague had swept and decimated it” (130). After Culla finishes the menial work of gravedigging and the trio lynches Clark, Culla finds Clark’s town empty. Clark’s store, open the previous day, is now “dim and dusty with abandonment” (146), as if it’s been closed for months. This unaccountable passage of time indicates the fabulist nature of the story.
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