Serial Killers In Cormac Mccarthy's Outer Dark

Cormac McCarthy references the Bible in the title of his second novel, Outer Dark. "I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 8:12). After his sister Rinthy gives birth to his child, Culla takes the baby and leaves it to die in the woods. When Rinthy finds out that the baby is not actually dead—it has been taken by a tinker—she goes off after the baby without really knowing how to find it, and Culla goes off after her. A subplot of the novel involves three cannibalistic serial killers who are one step behind Culla,

The novel is full of Christian and Greek mythology allusions, but rather than bring the characters closer to God, the characters are in a world in which God and light are absent. The Tennessee that the characters live in is one of darkness. Much of the novel happens at night: Culla leaves his baby in the woods; the ferry sinks, Culla twice meets the three cannibalistic serial killers. At the very beginning Culla is awoken from a dream where a “delegation of human ruin” have come to “a prophet,” (Outer Dark page 5). In the dream, “The sun hung on the cusp of eclipse” and “begun to blacken” and “darken” and did not “return” (Outer Dark page 5). The sun “grew cold and more black and silent” (Outer Dark page 5). The tinker tells Rinthy that “Hard people makes hard times,” and that he has “seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why God ain't put out the sun and gone away” (Outer Dark page 192). Blindness is ubiquitous in the novel

In the sermon, there is a blind man who says that because he is blind, the reverend “reckon” that he “ort to love Jesus” (Outer Dark page 226). The reverend says that “they's been more than one feller brought to the love of Jesus over the paths of affliction” and that “in a world darksome as this'n” he believes “a blind man ort to be better sighted than most” because “The grace of God don't rest easy on a man” and “can blind him easy as not” (Outer Dark page 226). “Jesus” loves “the lame the halt and the blind” because “Them is the ones scarred with God's mercy” and are “Stricken with his love” as the “flower in the garden of God” (Outer Dark page 226). The reverend is offering an alternative view of whether or not God is present in their world. If all the characters are blind or are afflicted with something else, which they are, then God is actually present because all of those poor people are his chosen ones whom he loves. This is an attitude that justifies not helping people because it says that those afflicted people will enter Heaven and that that is better than not being afflicted during