Blood Meridian: Similes 7 key examples

After wondrously surviving the Comanche massacre of Captain White's army, the kid and a heavily injured Sproule are left unprotected in the harsh yet stunningly beautiful desert landscape. McCarthy frequently employs simile when describing the settings his characters travel through, tying the physical setting into the broader themes of the novel. In this example, the turrets being akin to "basalt prophets" transforms inert rock into significant religious figures. Turrets, despite almost certainly referring to mere structures and not towers with weapons, nevertheless evokes war and violence, intertwining the violence that centers both the novel and this specific moment in the story with the surrounding desert and religion. The above simile then makes war into religion far before such a claim is made explicitly by the Judge.

Furthermore, the landscape itself becomes divine, not just alive but prescient, foretelling the death that will come for both Sproule and the kid. This description takes place against a backdrop of death: wooden crosses propped in cairns of stone serve as grave markers for travelers who have met an early demise on the road. Later in the novel the Judge tells a story of a murdered traveler whose grave was marked with rocks in a somewhat similar manner; in Blood Meridian, violence rarely fails to beget death.

The Argonauts were a group of Greek heroes who accompanied Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece. McCarthy's allusion to mythology transforms his goldseekers into the mythological goldseekers of epic poetry, evoking parallels between Blood Meridian and epic poems. While the Greek heroes were larger-than-life figures questing for a divine and powerful relic, McCarthy's goldseekers are "degenerates," a harsh juxtaposition that underscores the meager appearance of the goldseekers and their doomed quest for wealth.

The term "goldseekers" underscores these peoples' greed, portraying those who travel westward for gold in a negative light. Indeed, the simile comparing the goldseekers to a disease suggests westward expansion is natural yet perverse, an illness and also an inevitability that infects and destroys as it advances. The fact that these "itinerant degenerates" gift tobacco and coins reveals a generosity that is nevertheless damaging: giving both an addictive drug to the prisoners and the exact thing that they quest for in coins, which is a symbol of their greed. McCarthy, as he does throughout Blood Meridian, suggests in this simile the damaging consequences the pursuit of wealth has on the characters who are willing to go to terrible lengths to acquire it.

Many of the descriptions of the landscape, like the simile above, are also instances of imagery. In describing how the sun looks, newly risen above the pristine landscape, McCarthy paints a vivid picture for the reader of the smooth playa floor and the beautiful mountain. In Blood Meridian, there is real sublimity and beauty in the inhospitable land Glanton and his gang traverse.

In referring to the mountains as "bald" and "footless," McCarthy almost anthropomorphizes them, making the mountains into near-living things. Comparing the mountains to "floating temples" once more makes nature something divine, this time a place to worship God. The mountains appear to hover in the air between the ground and the sky—between the earth and heaven—divorced from the world of man. 

This intense, religion-evoking description precedes, as it so often does for McCathy, a description of a battle, this time between Glanton's army and the Apaches. The ungrounded nature of the mountains matches the ungrounded nature of the kid in the subsequent fight scene, who fights "as if he'd done it all before in a dream." The juxtaposition between the description of a beautiful landscape and the terrors of war appears time and time again in Blood Meridian and is crucial for understanding the novel. To what extent are people and their violence a consequence, or a perversion, of nature? How can such beauty coexist with such brutality?

The repeated "s" sounds mimic the back and forth of switchbacks in the snow, an equally repetitive motion of winding one's way up the mountains that visually matches the letter "s." In onomatopoeic fashion, the "s" sound sonically matches the shuffling of leaves and pine needles on the ground that is being described in the quotation. The alliteration then helps convey the imagery of the scene to the reader, highlighting the sounds of the scene described by McCarthy. 

The "l" in "leaves" and "laying" emphasizes, once more, the natural world McCarthy outlines for the reader, as well as the fact that the ground is littered with dead leaves. "Disclet" is either a word coined by McCarthy, as it seems to only appear in his novels, or else is simply archaic. We can imagine the definition of such a word—a small, disc-like object—but this word makes the natural world somewhat foreign to the reader, who is likely unfamiliar with the word. "Disclet" also combines the "s" and "l" sounds into a simile describing the leaves, sonically uniting the two sounds that dominate the quotation into one description of the natural world.

The first simile, "like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them," is initially puzzling insofar as all origins are by definition antecedent. The "them," however, refers to the men themselves, and thus McCarthy is asserting that the men ride as if they are invested with a purpose that came even before them. This simile gestures to fate, as if the men's innate purpose set them on a predestined path. At the same time, they are under their own free will making choices: choosing to hunt the Gileños, they are responsible for their dedication to blood and murder. Likewise, their purpose being antecedent to them can be interpreted as them acting as if they no longer knew their purpose, or as if the purpose of their actions was lost to history. 

The simile comparing them to "blood legatees" suggests Glanton and his army belong to a legacy of blood. It is both as if they were joined by blood as brothers, but also as if their legacy is one of a dedication to blood and violence. Given the preeminence of violence in Blood Meridian, the simile is an apt one. It is as if Glanton's crew has become one, purpose-filled collective; and yet, a purpose of war and destruction cannot unite people forever. While Glanton and his crew all act as if from a legacy of blood, or as if from an antecedent purpose, they are not truly from either. The similes are merely instances of figurative language, and neither the characters' legacy nor purpose is binding. Thus McCarthy's similes set the stage for Glanton's army's later unraveling and, ultimately, their deaths.

The burning tree is an allusion to the burning bush from Chapter 3 in the Book of Exodus. The description of the tree as "heraldic" as well as the simile comparing the sandvipers to "seemly gods [...] in Babylon" further evidences this quotation as an allusion to the Bible. The fact that this allusion takes place after the kid performs an act of mercy, which is rare in Blood Meridian, makes this allusion to the Bible particularly significant.

The burning bush is unifying, as the deadly forces of the desert—the kid as well as the sandvipers, tarantulas, mygales, and vinegarroons—come together, drawn by the warmth of nature. "Small sandvipers like seemly gods" is both an instance of alliteration and simile, with "s" sounds that sonically mimic the sound of a hissing snake. Although the snakes are "silent," the reader is still exposed to the sound of snakes through McCarthy's diction. The warmth of the burning tree is in many ways an act of mercy from God directed at the deadly creatures being snowed on in the desert. Even vicious animals like the kid require mercy, just as Shelby required mercy from the kid. In fact, the kid's pilgrimage is full of unlikely moments where, in his most desperate state, the world provides for him in a way that is almost divine, and the burning bush allusion highlights this facet of his journey while rewarding one of his most mercy-ladened moments.

In describing the sun as akin to a part of God, that which gives life—the sun—becomes God, he who gives life according to religious faith. Once more some aspect of nature is divine in McCarthy's novel, which consistently intertwines the natural world with religion. At the same time, the natural world is anthropomorphized, with the sun now an all-seeing eye. (It might also be noted here that by attributing to God an "eye," the novel also anthropomorphizes God, who, according to traditional Judeo-Christian belief, does not have a physical body.) The simile then complicates the relationship between people and nature, a relationship which dominates the novel as characters are exposed to a harsh yet beautiful natural world.

The people won't, however, cook "impartially," as the Judge claims, because the Judge has just purchased a hat from Toadvine for $125. Once more the Judge is better off than his compatriots, this time materially. Making the sun "God" further suggests the role of the Judge as that of the Devil: throughout the novel the Judge is always described as wearing a hat, and he needs a hat so badly that he pays an exorbitantly large sum for one. If the sun is akin to the eye of God, the Judge's insistence on always protecting himself from the sun with a hat then becomes the Judge staying outside of God's purview.