Pokémon2016

Cormac McCarthy is obviously very talented at writing descriptively and making the reader very uncomfortable during the many violent sections within his work. And speaking of making the reader uncomfortable, I cannot for the life of me understand why McCarthy chose to format Blood Meridian in the way that he did. There is a distinctive lack of punctuation in almost every instance where it's needed. Outside of periods, apostrophes, and the occasional comma, it is missing almost everything that is otherwise required for the English language. And even so, he misuses the punctuation he does include on multiple occasions. I looked into the rationality as to why he decided to write like this, and supposedly it was because he wanted to mimic a more natural speech pattern and to avoid grammatical interruption, using an alleged biblical method of narration. But the thing is, there's a very good reason these grammatical conventions were made in the first place, which McCarthy has elected to ignore. And if you've ever read the Bible (KJV) before, it actually incorporates punctuation where need be. Sure, the original manuscripts did not, but only because the languages they were written in (Hebrew and Greek) had yet to invent punctuation marks. Furthermore, if someone was narrating Blood Meridian the way it was written, the speaker would need to be a hyperactive eight-year-old, raving in much the same way he would about his top twenty Pokémon. The reason these grammatical conventions were implemented is because it makes it easier to process who's saying what. In the case of this book, the only way you can effectively read it is if you dart through the text extremely quickly, which makes it difficult for slower readers or for people who like picking apart the finer details. And the craziest part is that I could look past McCarthy's rather insane formatting altogether and excuse it as a stylistic choice if the story actually followed any sort of basic plot structure at all. The protagonist ("the kid") is an absolute plank of wood who does things just for the sake of doing them. "The kid" feels more like the character you play as in a RPG who gets himself into fights because the player got bored and is just messin' around at this point. As far as personality goes, "the kid" is also about as interesting and fleshed-out as a wooden plank. The fact that "the kid" doesn't even have a name kind of says it all, and not in a cool and mysterious sense. To put it simply, Blood Meridian reads more like a creepypasta written by some edgy fourteen-year-old than the critically acclaimed Western it has been described to me as. In fact, I think Blood Meridian is really only appealing as a sort of creepypasta. I only ever heard of it after the character Judge Holden blew up on social media. But before Judge Holden became viral on TikTok nearly forty years afterwards, pretty much no one cared about Blood Meridian. So what I'm essentially saying is this book is only appealing for shock value. But if you're looking for anything deeper than graphic depictions of violence, you'll probably be disappointed. Blood Meridian is basically just a fictional LiveLeak for bookworms, but with intentionally bad formatting quality.