Allison Chi

Reading the Apocalypse

May 23, 2025

“A Land of Some Other Order”: How Revelation’s Form and Style Influence Blood Meridian’s Vision of the American Frontier 

Set along the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian follows the Kid’s journey through the West, plunging the reader into the historical and neo-Biblical wasteland of the American frontier, where Indian scalps are highly valued. The Kid, a morally ambiguous 14-year-old, joins a group of filibusters and Captain Glanton’s scalp-hunting gang during his exploits, constantly encountering and inciting violence with the natives of the area, most notably the Comanche. Throughout the novel, Judge Holden, the highly knowledgeable and skillful second-in-command antagonist in Glanton’s bloodletting company, spurs the large-scale massacre and scalping of the natives on the American frontier onward. Ultimately, the Kid meets his demise at Holden’s hands at the end of the novel, allowing Holden to perpetuate the violence of the frontier. 

From McCarthy’s violent depiction of the frontier, many scholars have traditionally interpreted Blood Meridian as a deconstruction of the frontier myth—a romanticized portrayal of the American West, in which the supposed progress of civilization justifies the displacement and massacre of Native Americans. These critics have supported this claim through their analyses of Judge Holden, the apocalyptic landscape, and allusions to other texts, among many other parts of the novel. However, these studies neglect certain aspects of Blood Meridian’s form and Cormac McCarthy’s unique writing style, which are prominent parts of the novel. McCarthy’s prose, for instance, displays constantly shifting syntax, confusing the reader with its lengthiness and puzzling meaning. As a result of this type of prose, Blood Meridian takes on a biblical tone and structure resembling that of John of Patmos’ Book of Revelation. Despite the former being a meta-western of the 20th century and the latter a religious text of the 1st century detailing the impending cleansing of evil on Earth and the rewarding of the faithful, both share literary techniques and structures. Returning to the scholarly conversation, I argue that while many have commented on the form and style of the book, the essential component these studies lack is a focus on how McCarthy’s novel’s form and style imitate John of Patmos’ Book of Revelation. 

In this essay, I will explore how Blood Meridian directly takes on the form and style of the Book of Revelation. Through this exploration, I will show that this religious and apocalyptic framing of the novel supports and emphasizes previous scholars’ claims that Cormac McCarthy’s novel deconstructs the 19th-century American frontier and reveals the true brutality of that era. My examination of the effect of this apocalyptic influence will establish Blood Meridian’s apocalyptic interpretation of this era of American history in contrast to that of the frontier myth. 

To prove my argument, I will start with a review of David Holmberg’s “‘In a Time Before Nomenclature Was And Each Was All’: Blood Meridian’s Neomythic West and the Heterotopian Zone.”  In Holmberg’s essay, he examines Blood Meridian as a heterotopia, or as a simultaneously historic and neomythic world, to discover how this depiction distorts common views of the American West. Then, I will delve into Bernard A. Schopen’s “‘They Rode On’: Blood Meridian and the Art of Narrative.” In his essay, he focuses on how the novel’s style engages the reader, particularly within a religious frame. These ideas—to which I add an apocalyptic frame in addition to Schopen’s religious frame—will act as the base for my analysis of how Blood Meridian directly imitates the Book of Revelation’s form and style.

Next, I will take a formalist approach toward exploring the similarities between Blood Meridian and the Book of Revelation’s form. By form, I mean the text’s overall shape and structure. Then, I will analyze the style of both texts. By style, I mean the diction and sentence structure of the novels. Through showing how Blood Meridian’s form and style emulate the Book of Revelation’s,  I aim to reveal how McCarthy’s biblical prose intensifies the historic violence of the frontier, imbuing this era with a religious and apocalyptic feel. As a result, Blood Meridian provides an apocalyptic interpretation of the American frontier that opposes the traditional romantic version.

Other scholars have analyzed Blood Meridian through a strictly formalist lens, notably without the Book of Revelation, to associate a historical and religious undertone with McCarthy’s vision of the frontier. David Holmberg, in his article “‘In a Time Before Nomenclature Was and Each Was All’: Blood Meridian’s Neomythic West and the Heterotopian Zone,” argues that Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian deconstructs the heroic vision of the American West through a heterotopian depiction of a historic and neomythic frontier. His research demonstrates that Blood Meridian is simultaneously a “historical and mythological and theological and postmodern” novel (Holmberg 142). Through this claim, Holmberg challenges other scholars’ critical readings of McCarthy’s novel as solely one type of novel rather than a conglomerate of different types. Using a postmodernist lens, Holmberg analyzes Blood Meridian’s narrative features—like allusions to historical and fictional texts and biblical imagery—to show McCarthy uses a “neomythic narrative…to distort” and dismiss a romantic view of the American West (Holmberg 152). Overall, the frontier’s biblical and historical connotations are important to keep in the background for my later analysis of Blood Meridian’s form and style. 

Meanwhile, in his essay, Bernard A. Schopen argues that a formalist reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is crucial to understanding McCarthy’s view on the complexity of human evil and how the text engages the reader. Schopen’s research, which focuses on McCarthy’s novel “as a work of narrative art,” establishes the powerful effects of the text’s style and narrative framing on the reader’s response to the novel’s violent and tragic content (Schopen 190). Schopen’s strictly formalist reading of Blood Meridian diverges from and challenges critics’ standard use of an ideological and cultural lens to interpret the novel. Through his formalist analysis of the narrator’s voice, structure of the novel, and repetition of phrases and imagery, Schopen shows “the aesthetic and thematic effects” of the prose and readers’ fascination with the novel stem from the combination and blend of all of McCarthy’s unconventional literary techniques (Schopen 190). Ultimately, while Bernard Schopen does not offer a claim about the theme of the novel, he suggests that his formalist analysis indicates Blood Meridian uses a religious framework to present the reader with a relatable story of humanity’s confrontation with its own evil. This idea of McCarthy’s form and style lending a religious undertone to Blood Meridian is key to my analysis of how the Book of Revelation influences Blood Meridian’s literary aspects. 

While Holmberg and Schopen use a formalist lens to associate biblical qualities to McCarthy’s novel, this essay expands their ideas by analyzing the effects of Blood Meridian’s imitation of the Book of Revelation’s form on Cormac McCarthy’s perspective of the frontier myth. Blood Meridian, for instance, emulates the Book of Revelation’s sequential shape and structure to suggest that the frontier is characterized by its endless cycles of violence. For context, the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, presents a symbolic vision prophesying the end of the world, judgement, and the triumph of the faithful over sinners. Revelation’s content is full of cycles and can be roughly divided into five sections: the seven letters to the churches, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven bowls, and the creation of a New Jerusalem. In the middle three sections, which best represent these cycles, sinners are increasingly punished, with divine retribution ranging from natural disasters to plagues. In particular, the seven seals, trumpets, and bowls center around God’s judgment, with the seven letters and New Jerusalem framing these visions. This framing significantly emphasizes these sequences of punishments awaiting sinners and the salvation awaiting the faithful. Of note is that Blood Meridian has a temporal structure similar to that of Revelation. As Bernard Schopen claims, these sequences are organized around Glanton’s gang’s violent encounters with Native Americans and “the scalphunters’s departure from and arrival at cities” (Schopen 186). This novel’s beginning and end serve a similar purpose as in Revelation: to act as a frame for its main content of cycles of violence on the frontier. 

This imitation of Revelation’s structure lends an emphasis on the large-scale massacre of Native Americans that recurs throughout the majority of Blood Meridian. In Blood Meridian, for instance, McCarthy may depict the violence like this: “Within the first minute, the slaughter had become general…The horsemen moved among them and slew them with clubs or knives” (McCarthy 162). And then in the next chapter, the sequential massacre continues, this time of the Tigua tribe: “They approached those wretched pavilions in the long light of the day’s failing,...trampling down the grass wickiups and bludgeoning the shrieking householders” (McCarthy 183). This cycle mirrors Revelation’s bowl sequence: “So the first angel went and poured his bowl on the earth, and a foul and painful sore came on those who had the mark of the beast…The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse” (Revelation 16:2-3). Here, the first slaughter of the Gileños on page 162 acts as one of the angel’s destruction-inducing bowls. The second killing of the Tigua tribe in the next chapters functions as the next bowl in the emphasized cycle of war and bloodshed. Through this Revelation-like chain of events, the reader focuses on this progressing series of violence—violence which negatively depicts American subjugation of Native American tribes as primitive through words like “bludgeoning” and “slaughter.” In this way, McCarthy structures his novel like the apocalyptic Book of Revelation to show that the frontier is full of repeating destructive violence. 

With this idea of the purposeful emphasis of the sequential violence of both texts in mind, the reader will pay more attention to the forward-pushing progression of the Book of Revelation and Blood Meridian, which leads to their respective ends. This seeming onward push that Blood Meridian adopts further reveals the myth of the frontier. Starting with Revelation, this onwardness is visible throughout the text as it moves from vision to vision. This idea is evident as angels share their proclamations about judgement with John in chapter 14: “Then I saw another angel flying…Then another angel, a second…Then another angel, a third…” (Revelation 14:6-9). Here, “then” and the listing of the order of the angels create this sense of onwardness leading to the end. This forward progression culminates in a resolution of conflict with the final battle with Satan and the creation of a New Jerusalem for the faithful. Blood Meridian follows a similar progression that also culminates in an end, albeit a different type of end. This onward force, while in different variations,  takes the form of “riding on” repeatedly in the novel as Glanton’s gang continues its scalphunting journey. For instance, in just two pages, the following phrases appear: “Then they rode on,” “The riders rode on,” and “the company party mounted and rode out” (McCarthy 118-119). The repetition of this idea of moving onward echoes Revelation’s constant onward push, giving McCarthy’s writing an apocalyptic feel that this forward movement will lead somewhere or reveal a divine lesson as Revelation does with the same apocalyptic structure. Importantly, this “riding on” brings attention to how the text ends. 

Through Blood Meridian’s imitation of Revelation’s future-oriented end, Cormac McCarthy fully transforms the frontier into a historical and neobiblical heterotopia, which importantly lacks a God. In Revelation, the text ends with God’s claim of salvation for the faithful and his promise that “surely [he is] coming soon” (Revelation 22:20). This ending to the cycles of destruction in the earlier parts of the text gives a purpose to the predicted suffering of people on Earth and a time to which they can look forward to. In doing so, believers are reassured of God’s presence in their world since he is “coming soon” and creates a sense of timelessness since there is no exact date for this apocalypse. McCarthy also ends his novel with an eternal promise for the frontier. However, he heralds a world in which all of Glanton’s gang but Judge Holden, a symbol of war, dies, claiming that Holden “will never die” (McCarthy 349). This associates the frontier with perpetual war. Rather than leading to progress and a redeemed future like in Revelation, violence only leads to death and the dominance of a war-loving Judge Holden. McCarthy uses the timeless promise of Revelation’s ending to share his own message on the frontier’s eternal war. The predicted triumph of Judge Holden ultimately flips the frontier myth’s idea of progress on its head. Equally as important as Blood Meridian’s emulation of Revelation’s form is its imitation of Revelation’s style, which is at a literary level below form.

Through his Revelation-like style of writing, Cormac McCarthy demythologizes the frontier by remythologizing it through biblical language to associate a religious, as Bernard Schopen emphasizes, and apocalyptic tone with the frontier. One key aspect of Revelation’s style is paratactic sentences combined with or beginning with “and.” John of Patmos, for example, writes, “And the dead were judged according to their works…And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done” (Revelation 20:12-13). John repeatedly uses “and” to connect or start his sentences. Rather than using cause and effect conjunctions like “so,” he purposefully uses “and,” which creates a sense of neutrality and equality among the sentences. This literary device also results in a matter-of-fact prophetic tone about what will happen at the end of the world.  McCarthy adopts these paratactic sentences in his descriptions of the frontier to associate a similar prophetic feel with the West: “They rode on into the darkness and the moonblanched waste lay before them cold and pale and the moon sat in a ring overhead and in that ring lay a mock moon with its own cold gray and nacre seas” (McCarthy 255). Here, McCarthy, like John, uses “and” to combine multiple clauses instead of cause and effect conjunctions, resulting in a rhythm of reading that places emphasis on the “and.” This stylistic echo does not merely imitate biblical form but immerses the reader in a religious atmosphere that contrasts with the violent historical content. This style enhances the novel’s role as an apocalyptic vision and forces a confrontation with the horror of the frontier. Furthermore, this idea mirrors Schopen’s “profoundly religious” reading of Blood Meridian, which he momentarily touches on at the end of his essay (Schopen 190). From this description of the frontier in conjunction with Revelation’s “and” sentences, parts of Blood Meridian transform from the historical into the biblical. David Holmberg’s concept of the frontier as a “heterotopia” best embodies this idea and leads to a religious interpretation of McCarthy’s style. 

This concept of Blood Meridian as a biblical world opens up further interpretation of McCarthy’s other style choices taken from Revelation. Phrases like “and I saw” force the reader to see through the eyes of the Kid in his descriptions of war on the heterotopian frontier to present an anti-frontier myth. For instance, this phrase is repeated in a scene where the Comanches ambush the Kid and his filibuster group:  

Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. (McCarthy 56)

Here, McCarthy vividly describes the brutality of war on the frontier through the Kid’s neutral perspective. Notably, the extreme historical violence McCarthy describes is elevated by the prophetic “and I saw” of the Book of Revelation. His repeated use of “and I saw” mirrors John of Patmos’ use of “I saw” at the beginning of many chapters in Revelation. Chapter 5 starts with “Then I saw in the right hand of the one seated on the throne a scroll” (Revelation 5:1). Chapter 6 opens with “Then I saw the Lamb open one of the seven seals” (Revelation 6:1). Chapter 7 similarly begins with “After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth” (Revelation 7:1). Following each of these starting sentences, John details his visions of the apocalypse, such as the opening of the seven seals, which releases horses and riders that create chaos and war on Earth. McCarthy similarly presents the events of his text through another person's eyes, in this case, the Kid’s. In doing so, the historical events of Native American subjugation become mythic, much like Holmberg’s heterotopian vision of the frontier. As a result, as Bernard Schopen suggests, “the novel presents, through its every word, phrase, and sentence, its every pattern and structure, a vision of human existence reduced to a confrontation with a fundamental mystery for which religion has traditionally provided answers: human evil” (Schopen 191). His claim about how patterns within the novel depict a religious confrontation with human evil acts on a more cosmic scale than this essay’s interpretation of the repetition of “and I saw.” While “human evil” is a component of the frontier, more specifically, these patterns result in the reader’s apocalyptic confrontation with the realities of the frontier: unglorified bloodshed. In this way, McCarthy presents a first-person negative vision of the frontier to the reader, using a similar method as John to reveal a truth. 

From analyzing the impact of Blood Meridian’s imitation of the Book of Revelation’s structure and style, Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic revelation about the frontier takes shape. Unlike previous scholars’ reading of Blood Meridian, this essay’s interpretation posits McCarthy’s anti-Western as an apocalyptic text similar to the Book of Revelation. His use of Revelation’s sequential structure and unique sentence patterns complements his bloody and negative presentation of the American frontier. Through these combined historical and religious elements, Blood Meridian follows an apocalyptic format, using its heightened violent content to share a revelation with the reader about the frontier: this 19th-century landscape was not a place of progress or civilization, but rather a hellscape cycling through meaningless and eternal self-imposed destruction. 

While Blood Meridian echoes Revelation’s prophetic style to convey an apocalyptic vision, this sacred form also paradoxically frames scenes of merciless violence and moral ambiguity. This contrast between prophetic language and structure and human savagery creates an ironic critique, suggesting that the frontier’s mythology is not a divine destiny but a grim tragedy disguised in the language of prophecy. Traditionally an integral American land of expansion of territory and American civilization, the frontier now becomes a modern symbol of the inherent violence embedded in the American identity through McCarthy’s critique and disproval of this myth. By unveiling the frontier as a site of eternal, senseless destruction cloaked in prophetic language, this essay’s use of Revelation’s lens ultimately supports a new truth about the frontier—one that challenges readers to question a fundamental component of America’s glorified identity and history.

Works Cited

Coogan, Michael David, et al., editors. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: With the Apocrypha. 4th ed., Oxford University Press, 2010.

Holmberg, David. “‘IN A TIME BEFORE NOMENCLATURE WAS AND EACH WAS ALL’: ‘Blood Meridian’’s Neomythic West and the Heterotopian Zone.” Western American Literature, vol. 44, no. 2, 2009, pp. 140–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43022721. Accessed 16 Apr. 2025.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West. Vintage International, 1992.

Schopen, Bernard A. “‘They Rode On’: ‘Blood Meridian’ and the Art of Narrative.” Western American Literature, vol. 30, no. 2, 1995, pp. 179–94. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43024695. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.