“Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”

Matthew 22:13

In the second book of his informal “Appalachian trilogy” (also comprising The Orchard Keeper and Child of God), Cormac McCarthy grimly limns what can be deemed the “encroaching abyss”. Set against an indeterminate, rural backdrop, Outer Dark depicts the looming threat of nihilism, the Calvinist view of total depravity, and the delineation between sacred and profane spaces. The narrative traces the separate but parallel journeys of two central characters, Culla and Rinthy Holme, and the ill-starred fate of their nameless child–the consummation of Culla and Rinthy’s illicit, incestuous relationship. Culla, out of deep shame of this relationship, leaves the child in the forest and tells his sister that the child has died of natural causes. Soon unearthing her brother’s act of radical deception, Rinthy sets out to recover her child.

If the guiding concept of the novel is the encroaching abyss, its dialectical counterpart– the movement toward purposive freedom–must be said to play a role as well, if only negatively. Rinthy and Culla each have ends that orient them and toward which they strive with each passing chapter. Culla’s is nominally work, as evidenced by his ephemeral but numerous stints with odd jobs (this end is merely nominal in that, as is eventually revealed, Culla is really searching for his sister). Rinthy’s is her child, who she believes has been taken by an itinerant tinker. Along the way, each of them is subject to myriad forms of degeneracy in the people and the landscapes they encounter. Derelict properties and depraved personages litter the spaces in which each protagonist dwells. Although the idea of a sacred space regulates Culla and Rinthy’s actions, that idea is constantly negated by the inhospitable spaces they are hurled through.

The closest thing to sacrality in the novel is the siblings’ cabin, which functions as a twofold symbol of the sanctity of familial bond and the state of original innocence before the Fall. In this state, we are presented with a dream of Culla’s:

“There was a prophet standing in the square with arms upheld in exhortation to the beggared multitude gathered there. A delegation of human ruin who attended him with blind eyes upturned and puckered stumps and leprous sores. The sun hung on the cusp of the eclipse and the prophet spoke to them. This hour the sun would darken and all these souls would be cured of their afflictions before it appeared again. And the dreamer himself was caught up among the supplicants and when they had been blessed and the sun began to blacken he did push forward and hold up his hand and call out. Me, he cried. Can I be cured? The prophet looked down as if surprised to see him there amidst such pariahs. The sun paused. He said: Yes, I think perhaps you will be cured. Then the sun buckled and dark fell like a shout” (5).

The dream is no hopeful portent, however, as Culla’s sin ineluctably haunts him with no hope of salvation immediately in sight. The crushing weight of this tainted nature (a point of emphasis in Calvinist theology) is personified by three men whose acts of wanton violence are depicted in interspliced chapters written in italics, and who serve as an allusion to the three Furies, or goddesses of vengeance in Greek mythology. These nightriders bring a violent calamity that starkly opposes the maternal grace and relative peace of Rinthy’s journey. Interestingly, these men all remain nameless, just like the child. This is no accident, as the nameless are famously stricken by the absence of divine communion; by being cast into the outer darkness, they involuntarily relinquish any claim to identity at all and become metaphysically void (evil has no real being of its own, but is rather the absence of good).

Culla, in shirking responsibility and eschewing repentance, seals his fate as a perpetual, aimless wanderer, just as Cain was condemned to wander without any direct harm befalling him. He is blind in spirit if not vision, as the cruelly ironic closing lines capture: “He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way” (242). It is really Culla himself who is blind; he is blind to his inner darkness and its propensity to transform into outer darkness. Conversely, Rinthy embraces the responsibilities intrinsic to motherhood in her relentless search for the child. Yet, in McCarthy’s world of unfathomable, brute randomness and injustice, she isn’t ultimately rewarded for her effort and accountability. 

Moral categories and considerations are rendered wholly impotent in the affairs of this grotesque world. All is subsumed by indomitable, capricious fate. If there is any metaphysics of this world, it is clearly a metaphysics of the bare particular and of pure experience. McCarthy is uninterested in types, patterns, or principles; he is the perennial anti-Platonist. He gives us a pastoral portrait of the terror of sin, sharpened on the blade of perfectly textured prose that refuses to compromise on rawness.