Blood Meridian Blog 3: Image Study

               In the book Blood Meridian, there are many images throughtout, both violent and passive that exemplify the dark aspects of this book. A major image in the book, involved heavily in violence is the scalping business which is what Glanton and his gang set out into the wilderness to cash in for money. It is described in vivid detail and is a very bloody and distasteful yet it is the overall purpose of their trips. After committing acts of murder, they then disgrace the bodies even further by cutting off the scalps of their heads. They then take these grisly trophies and sell them at towns for money. The group set off with scalping Native Americans in their minds, however as the book progresses, their lust for violence increases exponentially and they soon begin to scalp almost anybody they can reach.

Another image is the shootings that occur frequently in the novel. This is what most people in the book die by as everbody likes shooting at each other. Guns and it become a sort of constant companion as everyone has one and most everyone gets shot. Nearly no one survives from being shot in the book, however there is one relatively major character who does. This is the Ex-priest who no only somehow survives getting shot through the neck by The Judge, but also escapes (to the best of my knowledge) as  the book hints since it McCarthy never really gives a straight answer. A third image is again the natural world as this inhospitable wasteland is a place of death as well as refuge to whoever comes looking for it. It decimates almost anyone who enters and is very unforgiving. It has little sense of balance/harmony especially in the desert. A fourth image would be human condition of which there is a severe inbalance of. All of the people in Glanton's gang are in some way psycologically unstable.e Most easily kill other men in the blink of an eye, they scalp anybody they can for money and they have a general disregard for human life. None are as worse as The Judge however. He is the ultimate testiomony to the frality of the human psycological makeup. He can appear to be an elegant gentlemen in one moment and a brutal man the next. He will be just as likely to shake your hand and then stab you in the back. He likes classical music, he can play classical music and he can also speak Dutch. These are all points of higher classes while he ironically is at the low half.