As a refresher from my copywork blogpost (click here to read the full post), here is the color coding on the highlights:
- Orange for Action beats
- Green for Descriptions
- No highlights for Dialogue
- Yellow for Summary/Transition
- Blue for Thoughts
- Pink for Authorial/Narrator Intrusion
- Purple for Exposition
A double highlight means that a sentence is functioning with more than one mode.
Blood Meridian is not clean with regards to transitions between abstract and concrete beats. As you can see in the exercise, the rhythm shifts wildly between modes. To start, the narrator invites us to “see the child”, followed by a physical description of the child. Facts are then relayed to us regarding the child’s parents and the state of the child.
The next beats relates to the child running away. He gets into fights, gets shot at, is tended to, and, as soon as he recovers, runs away once more. He boards a boat that leaves for Texas.
We go deep into abstract beats as the narrator emphasizes that the child is “finally divested of all that he has been.” The narrator portends the child’s fate, whether he will shape “the stuff of creation” or be molded as “his own heart is not another kind of clay.”
Then we return to concrete beats as the child disembarks from the boat and continues his journey, encountering whores that call to him from the dark, walking the sand roads alone, passing settlements and farms for wages, then witnessing a hanging.
The narrator mentions that the year is eighteen and forty-nine, and the scene ends with the image of the child “riding up through the latterday republic of Fredonia into the town of Nacogdoches.”
The POV is third-person omniscient. The narrator displays their omniscience when they mention “he has a sister in this world that he will not see again.” Also, the narrator tells of the “parricide hanged in a crossroads hamlet.” The child cannot know that the condemned is a parricide, and it is never dramatized whether the child had asked “his friends” who the condemned is.
Within this scene, the narrator hasn’t revealed the names of the characters, a sign that the narrator is indifferent towards them.
This scene is crammed with symbols and imagery. Birth is the main symbol in this scene and also one of the themes in this book. The starting sentence “See the child...” is evidence of this, as if the narrator is holding up the newborn to us.
Crossing a body of water is a known symbol for birth. Twice did the child cross a river to get where he wants. But an explicit symbol of birth is when the child gets into a fight, gets shot and becomes bloodied. The image of the tavernkeeper’s wife is that of a midwife, caring for the newly born child, cleaning him of the blood and nursing him to health. The narrator then hammers it by saying that the child has been “finally divested of all he has been.”
Despite the symbolism and themes regarding birth and children, the book has horrific imagery and events surrounding children. I believe it symbolizes the death of America's infancy.
Below is a graph of the narrative modes of the copied scene. This shows the rhythm between abstract and concrete beats. It scales from -3 to +3 with the following sequence respectively: Exposition (as -3), Intrusion, Thought, Transition (as 0.5), Description, Dialogue and Action (as +3).
There you have it folks! Please follow my twitter account (link below) to get an update on the next analysis. As always, keep writing.
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