A Landscape of the Damned: Evil and Nothingness in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark

Abstract

The first scholars to write about Cormac McCarthy labeled him a nihilist. The novels of McCarthy unrelentingly undermine the institutions of Christian religion. By contrast, the language of Christian theology arises throughout McCarthy’s corpus. This chapter attempts to complicate this question of McCarthy’s religion through a reading of his novel Outer Dark. The classic formulation of evil is the privation of good. Karl Barth elaborated upon this concept and the chapter provides an extended consideration of das Nichtige: Nothingness. Outer Dark can be read on these theological terms by interpreting the three serial murderers who wander Appalachia as an unholy trinity of Satanic Nothingness. The failed moral choices of the antihero Culla Holme consign him to what McCarthy calls a “faintly smoking garden of the dead” and a “landscape of the damned.”