On Teaching Blood Meridian

Twenty-Five Years of Teaching McCarthy's Masterpiece

I taught Blood Meridian for the first time in the spring of 2001. I was in my PhD program at the University of Denver, teaching an Approaches to Literature class as a TA.

As a whole, students were put off by the ultra-violence of the novel’s first 100 pages. I remember one young woman saying, “Okay, I get it. It’s like, ‘There’s some people over there: let’s kill them.’”

But the mood of the class shifted when we got to Tobin’s story of the Judge’s gunpowder in Chapter X. The students became fascinated by Holden, who began to seduce and horrify them in equal measure.

In 2003, I finished my doctorate and was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. That semester, I taught Blood Meridian in an Intro to Fiction Writing course—the students were not fascinated by Judge Holden at all. They were confused, shocked, repulsed. I decided to pump the breaks on teaching the novel again until the spring of 2005.