Introduction

Abstract

The introductory chapter traces the history of scholarship on McCarthy that recognizes the moral weight of his works. Hillier acknowledges the significant contribution of the first generation of McCarthy scholars in expanding approaches to interpreting the author, while allowing for an abiding philosophical, and even religious, framework, a “deeper structure” in which McCarthy’s literary sensibility is conscious of the presence of beauty and of moral and spiritual value. McCarthy’s fiction reflects the panorama of a Renaissance mind, a magpie intelligence that absorbs and synthesizes entire disciplines of thought, as is also evident from his collaboration with renowned scientists at the Santa Fe Institute. The chapter proposes that the nihilist-pessimist-misanthropist thesis regarding McCarthy’s fiction is overstated, and that McCarthy remains as intrigued by the mystery of goodness as he is by the mystery of evil. At the heart of McCarthy’s literary project is a record of souls at hazard, chronicles of characters, much like ourselves, perhaps, who make apparently small but actually momentous moral decisions, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. A sense of rightness tacitly or vocally haunts McCarthy’s characters and his pages. McCarthy’s great subject, Hillier contends, is the miracle and possibility of goodness in spite of the infliction of moral and natural evil. McCarthy’s conviction in, or at the very least his enduring hope for, a bedrock universal ethical standard against which his villains and moral cowards fall short, and to which his heroes and upright folk strive to adhere, is at the root of his imaginative vision.