First off, I’ll get the obvious out of the way: This book deserves the praise it gets. I get it.
However
Maybe this is just an age maturity thing (I’m 23, thought I was relatively smart until I saw people dissect this book in ways my tiny mind could ever comprehend) but so much of this book, particularly the writing itself, has gone completely over my head. And yet I can still see how jaw dropping some sections are. I just don’t totally get them.
The violence really hasn’t bothered me all that much. In fairness I have about 100 pages left, but I really can’t see it getting much worse than I’ve already read. Sure it’s totally brutal and horrible and gross to read such senseless violence, but it makes sense. The Wild West was an absolute inhumane time in history, and this book portrays that very well. Maybe I’m numb to it at this point.
But I’d be lying if I said I gave a shit about the characters. I don’t. And maybe that’s the whole point, but being true to myself, my favourite part of stories is the characters. These are underdeveloped (again, maybe on purpose) names on a page. Glanton and the Kid are the names I know most, and of course the Judge. The Judge is the only character in this book I could even call a character. And a fucking creepy one as well. His monologues that I can hardly decipher? Amazing.
Blood Meridian is a draining book. The prose is bleak and brutal, people die constantly in horrible ways, the language is so hard to follow, and yet I do, despite everything I’ve said, look forward to seeing how this ends. Maybe I would “get it” if I was 20 years older, but it has been a reading experience I won’t forget for a long time.
I still come across books like that occasionally, and I’ve learned to just go with the flow and enjoy the confusion :). I can get a lot out of a book even if I miss relatively “obvious” ideas or subtext, much less the level of analysis that people can get out of a book when they really try. Some books benefit from multiple reads or even from reading the book with annotations or a companion work. Other books are, frankly, better if you don’t try to read too deeply into them.
And, frankly, some analysis I’ve read definitely crosses the line from insight to reading signal from noise. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar! Humans are great at finding complex patterns and meaning in the outside world… even if that meaning isn’t really there, or isn’t even meaningful.
I just finished Blood Meridian last week and I had followed along chapter by chapter on litcharts. After a few chapters I just gave up on the ‘analysis’ section and read the summary just to sorta reinforce what I just read and help clarify some things. The analysis stuff drove me crazy - you hit the nail on the head - “Glanton smokes a cigar which represents the fire burning in all men’s hearts and the risks one is willing to take to enjoy a fleeting moment” Yeeesh
I think there is a point where people over-analyze and I feel that can actually take the fun out of it. Makes it more into an assignment rather than enjoying the art. My two cents anyway, to each their own.