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.
Themes
Suffering in Outer Darkness
The title of the novel alludes to the “outer darkness” mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, which is usually interpreted as the lake of fire, or hell, a place absent light (a symbol of God’s goodness). In Matthew 22, Jesus tells the parable of the wedding feast, which symbolizes the joyous festivity waiting for true believers in the kingdom of heaven. In the parable, a man in improper attire is expelled from the feast into outer darkness; he lacks the faith in Christ necessary for admission to heaven. Those cast into outer darkness suffer “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 22:13), i.e., they experience both spiritual and physical suffering. McCarthy sets his novel in this outer darkness, a cursed realm separated from the light of God. Like those in the Bible who reject salvation through faith in Christ, Culla suffers despair and regret for forsaking light for a world of darkness.
In banishing himself to a world of darkness, Culla suffers like those who reject Christ in the Gospel of Matthew. Culla’s story begins with his parable-esque nightmare in which his outburst causes permanent darkness to befall him and the crowd of people around him. Unlike them, Culla is healthy; nonetheless, he bursts forth, asking for salvation as if his case were the most desperate. This selfishness extinguishes the sun, a motif symbolizing the evil and darkness Culla spreads. The final line of this first chapter, in which Culla finds himself assailed by lightning beside his screaming child that he’s left to die, reads as a continuation of his nightmare, which ends with the angry mob falling on him in the darkness: “[Culla] lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor” (18). Here, darkness symbolizes the crimes Culla spends the story fleeing. Despite his efforts, these crimes shadow his every move in the form of the trio, the personification of darkness. Culla’s own actions condemn him to suffer in a world of darkness, devoid of the light that blesses Rinthy.
Like Cain, Culla is chained to the crimes he tries to conceal, condemned to travel forever as a fugitive and vagabond. The description of Culla turning around and around in the square in Preston Flats, searching desperately for any sign of life, suggests that he’s doomed to moil (work hard and move about in confusion and agitation) in a hellish wasteland of outer darkness. Alone in the deserted town, he appears as “an amphitheatrical figure in that moonwrought waste manacled to a shadow that struggled grossly in the dust” (130). Culla’s grand, “amphitheatrical” appearance is belied by his struggling shadow, which, being “manacled” to him, suggests that its unshakeable. The motif of shadow reveals Culla’s true predicament, to which he remains blind: He’s chained to the shadowy, immoral part of himself—the terrible crimes of his past. Culla believes that his actions play no role in his weeping and gnashing of teeth, when in fact his suffering results from the trio’s punishment of his crimes. Culla brings darkness and disturbance upon himself.
The Curse of Cain
In the godforsaken world of Outer Dark, Culla’s misfortune resembles Cain’s in the Bible. In Genesis 4:12, God condemns Cain to be a “fugitive and vagabond in the earth” for murdering his brother, Abel, and for lying about this crime to God. Cain laments that God’s curse will make everyone he meets want to kill him; God ensures that no one will do so (and thus spare Cain his sentence of wandering) by marking Cain. Anyone who harms Cain will suffer seven times the injury they inflict. Culla’s fate echoes Cain’s: Culla leaves his baby to die, effectively committing murder, and lies about the child’s death to Rinthy. His filicide replaces Cain’s fratricide; his lie to his kin (Rinthy) replaces Cain’s lie to God. The difference between the stories is that in the barren, godforsaken world of Outer Dark, there is no God to punish Culla for his sins. Instead, the “grim triune” (129) of amoral figures—an epithet that denotes an anti-Trinity—replaces God, ensuring that Culla remains an outcast and vagabond.
The trio murders people who slight or threaten Culla, echoing God’s promise to inflict sevenfold suffering on those who harm Cain. Culla feels mistreated by Squire Salter; subsequently, the trio murders Salter. A similar series of events occurs with Clark. Like Salter, Clark condescends to Culla, lording his power over him. The following day, Culla finds Clark hanged in a tree.
Salter reminds Culla of what he wants to forget, infuriating him. Salter accuses Culla of being a fugitive, makes him labor with an ax instead of a saw, and lectures him on the sin of laziness and the sanctity of family. Culla is indeed fleeing something (his misdeeds), making him a fugitive from his guilt. Making the work harder than it needs to be by denying Culla a saw is spiteful; it’s also an unwelcome reminder of the other work Culla did with an ax: making a fake grave to conceal his attempted filicide. To top it off, Salter is a hypocrite: He lectures Culla on the importance of hard work and family, yet he demeans his wife and stands around, letting Culla and John, the Black man who’s implied to be an indentured servant or enslaved by Salter, do all the work. Culla’s shadow betrays his silent indignation at Salter’s lecture: “Their shadows canted upon the whitewashed brick of the kitchen shed in a pantomime of static violence in which the squire reeled backward and [Culla] leaned upon him in headlong assault” (30). Culla’s shadow reveals his violent fantasy of revenge. In killing Salter before he can hurt Culla for stealing his boots, the trio realizes Culla’s violent fantasy, getting revenge on his behalf.
The trio is like Culla’s shadow: Sometimes they’re cast in front of him, wreaking havoc before he arrives somewhere; other times they’re cast behind him, wreaking a bloody wake of destruction. The trio predicts Culla’s every move, ensuring he suffers maximal misfortune. In Cheatham prior to Culla’s arrival, the trio uses the spade they steal from Squire Salter to disinter and desecrate three corpses. As the new stranger in town, Culla is accused of these crimes and chased by deputies, preventing him from settling there and working as he hoped to. The trio orchestrates Culla’s persecution, making him a fugitive from the law (in addition to a fugitive from his guilt).
Just as God condemns Cain to a life wandering the earth, the grim triune ensures that Culla remains a fugitive and vagabond. Culla can never stay in one place for too long because violence inevitably follows him, turning the locals against him and threatening his life. They murder those who threaten to deliver Culla from his wandering, echoing God’s sevenfold punishment of those who harmed Cain. The trio shadows Culla like the curse of Cain, ensuring that no one interferes with his eternal punishment.
Love as Humanity’s Saving Grace
Rinthy is a beacon of light in her grim, godforsaken world. Despite its tragic end, her loving quest to reclaim her child is an assertion of hope against a background of despair. This quest causes her to suffer loss, but it also redeems her, sparing her the alienation and suffering of turning away from the world that Culla suffers.
In daring to hope for her child’s safe return, Rinthy risks the suffering of having this hope dashed, as it is in the burned glade. In contrast, Culla tries to insulate himself from the suffering of the world. This only results in alienating Culla, confining him to an existential limbo represented by his endless wandering. This contrast is represented in Culla and Rinthy’s footwear, or lack thereof. The veal-skin boots Culla steals from Salter protect him from the harsh ground he travels. The boots are a metaphor for the way in which Culla tries to insulate himself from the pain and suffering of the world. That they’re stolen suggests that there’s something immoral and misguided about his effort to insulate himself. Seemingly in punishment for the crimes Culla flees, the leader of the trio forces Culla to relinquish the veal-skin boots for a rotting pair, thereby preventing Culla from easing the physical pain of his wandering. In contrast, Rinthy—who wears shoes at the beginning of her search—loses them by the time she arrives in the doctor’s town. Her bare feet signify her vulnerability to the harshness of the world. When the lawyer leads her to the doctor’s office, she feels “under her naked feet the cold print of nailheads reared from the worn boards” (148). In Catholicism, Christ’s crucifixion wounds signify his sacrificial grace. Similarly, Rinthy’s exposure to these nails signifies the pain she bears in the name of love.
Because Rinthy represents love and hope, her vulnerability to suffering is a strength, not a weakness. Rinthy exemplifies the dignity of love amid violence and cosmic indifference. As Vereen M. Bell argues in The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy, “[Rinthy’s] pain is caused by her choice to love and need, by her unwillingness to be less than human” (“Word and Flesh: Outer Dark.” The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy, UP Louisiana State, 1988, p. 50). Without God, the only means of redemption in the violent, amoral world of Outer Dark is love.
Unlike in the Bible, where God rewards absolute faith, in Outer Dark, Rinthy enjoys no reward for enduring trials and tribulations. Instead, at the end of her quest, the violent, indifferent world that has remained on the borders of Rinthy’s narrative finally confronts her. In the burned glade, death and beauty intermingle in McCarthy’s poetic language. Rinthy wears “sundrained cerements” (241)—a cerement is a cloth for wrapping a corpse—and yet looks like a “fallow doe […] cradled in a grail of jade and windy light” (241). Rinthy is marked by death without being lost to life. Nevertheless, Rinthy’s bearing expresses the almost unbearable pain of this balance: She “step[s] softly with her air of blooded ruin about the glade in a frail agony of grace” (241). Rinthy exemplifies the tenuous persistence of life through an unredeemable world, a testament to the humanity of love.
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