“The Virginian” and “Blood Meridian” are novels about the Wild West and both aimed at deglamourising the frontier. For example, gunfights are very often depicted in Western films, but in fact “less than one third of victims died in exchanges of gunfire ”. The authors show that there is much more behind the idealised picture of cowboys, that it was a dark time when various means to achieve goals were used. Starting with the ideology of that time, when the Manifest Destiny was popular: the Americans were God’s chosen people and their destiny was “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man - the immutable truth and beneficence of God ”. That is why other nations such as Mexicans or Indians were considered as something that does …show more content…
McCarthy gives negative answer, and the scene with Elrod and the man proves it. One can see here the analogy between the man when he was a kid and Elrod: he is without parents and travels with the gang of youngsters that remind of Glanton’s gang. The man tries to restrain the young boy, but he does not want to listen, and the man has to kill him in self defence, although he does not want to do it. Another angle would be to compare the conversation of Elrod and the man with the kid and the judge relationship but the other way round. The judge was trying to influence the kid and to breed the idea of eternal violence, and the scene with Elrod shows that he did not succeed completely, since the man is trying to avoid violence in first stance, but rather to calm him down. Unfortunately, it does not work out, and it seems that there is vicious circle, and to stop violence one need to posses this quality himself. A plotline that appears here again is the judge’s “sins of the fathers” story about the shopkeeper and the traveller. Dead father or the father who is not interested in his child harms in the same way as the father with evil intentions does: the man and Elrod are close to the traveller’s son and they try to live up the masculinity idea, but they will never reach the