Talk:Blood Meridian

message: Yeah in the characters section under Toadvine it says that him the kid and Bathcat sat out "the most violent massacre" or whatever but I'm pretty sure that never happens their in on every one. I remember at one point that Toadvine speaks up against murdering innocent Gilenos before the first massacre but never anything about them sitting it out.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.78.203.2 (talk) 07:05, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: [resolved] Characters

message: Shouldn't this redirect to "Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West"?
:I think that the standard naming practice in the case of a novel with two names is to use the primary name as the name of the article. See Doctor Fischer of Geneva, the full title of which is Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party. | Klaw Talk 04:56, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: No real need for discussion, just go ahead and merge.Plowboylifestyle 21:24, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Redirect

message: ===Murdered?===
Actually, due to some earlier references to the judge's possible homosexuality (the naked dead boy in the fort, the saving-then-killing-and-scalping of the indian boy, the naked fool in the judge's room) and the fact that the judge is naked when the kid enters the latrine, along with the reaction of the men outside the latrine, I thought that there was somthing far different from murder going on at the end of that novel.
:Um source? Naked != sex. LilDice 20:24, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Blood Meridian. It's pretty good. You should read it sometime, or at least the Wiki article. — LlywelynII 13:59, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

text: Yea I agree with you, the people who read rape into it can if they want, but regardldess the kid got what was coming to him. LilDice 01:08, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

text: I agree completely; and not only does Bloom believe the Kid to be dead but as does the majority of critical thought on the novel. In fact, I honestly can't recall a single statement theorizing the kid to have survived the ending. The only debate is to whether he was raped prior to his murder by the Judge. Qjuad 16:00, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

text: The Judge raped and killed the girl who owned the bear, then killed the Kid and set it up as the Kid killed the girl. The novel ends as it begins: the real pedophile sets somebody else up but escapes clean himself.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.66.245.5 (talk) 23:04, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

text: sorry but all interpretations need proper third party sources. Active Banana   ( bananaphone 21:27, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: [resolved] The Kid was murdered?

message: Actually, due to some earlier references to the judge's possible homosexuality (the naked dead boy in the fort, the saving-then-killing-and-scalping of the indian boy, the naked fool in the judge's room) and the fact that the judge is naked when the kid enters the latrine, along with the reaction of the men outside the latrine, I thought that there was somthing far different from murder going on at the end of that novel.
:Um source? Naked != sex. LilDice 20:24, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Blood Meridian. It's pretty good. You should read it sometime, or at least the Wiki article. — LlywelynII 13:59, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Murdered?

message: I finished the novel last night and thought it was obvious that the judge murdered the kid at the end.  Most horribly, as Bloom noted.  The kid enters the jakes, goes in and the judge, naked, rises behind him puts his giant arms around him, pulling him close to his "terrible flesh."  Then the judge locks the door.  Later the two men are horrified at the scene.  Who knows what the judge did to him, but it didn't end well for the kid.  I think the judge was naked becuase he just raped and murdered the missing girl.  Perhaps he violated the kid as well, but I don't think so right now.  Certainly with the judge, anything is possible.  He killed him though, as the judge is the one true dancer.  Bears that dance, bears that don't.
:Yea I agree with you, the people who read rape into it can if they want, but regardldess the kid got what was coming to him. LilDice 01:08, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Murder 

message: It's perfectly fair to say that the kid was murdered by the judge. Whether he was also buggered by the judge is a less clear. But it doesn't matter. It's enough that he obviously could have been. Those who would insist on being more cautious about saying whether the kid was killed by the judge are the same who would hold out for the possibility that Hemmingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" might be about something other than abortion. Additionally, you've got heavy-weight, professional judgement about the matter with Bloom. This is not something to toil over. --Docblueson 10:20, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree completely; and not only does Bloom believe the Kid to be dead but as does the majority of critical thought on the novel. In fact, I honestly can't recall a single statement theorizing the kid to have survived the ending. The only debate is to whether he was raped prior to his murder by the Judge. Qjuad 16:00, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  It's Obvious 

message: Seems likely to me that the Judge represents War/Death (or a specific form of violence), and that the Kid now a Man represents a now outdated time and practice (perhaps the initial Indian Wars), his death (or more likely in my opinion, Suicide in the Jakes), represents the passing of this time and the coming of a new set of wars (namely the Range Wars and the Civil War), the first of which is hinted at in the epilogue.  I might tend to read subtexts that arent their, but to me the Judge is an embodiement of a force of mankind and the debate over murder and sodomy are far to literal and belittle the power of the writing. 
:The Judge raped and killed the girl who owned the bear, then killed the Kid and set it up as the Kid killed the girl. The novel ends as it begins: the real pedophile sets somebody else up but escapes clean himself.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.66.245.5 (talk) 23:04, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Murdered? Maybe but not realy important IMO

message: Agree with the above: It's clear that the kid was murdered by the judge. Any "ambiguity" stems from McCarthy's method of storytelling.
However, what's less than clear is whether the "murder" was consensual: I get the feeling that the Kid's wandering around prior to re-encountering the judge was a way for CM to show how spiritually dead The Kid is, and by the time he meets the judge in the outhouse he's ready to "meet his maker" (ie, the Judge), who lovingly embraces The Kid and sends him to the logical end that he had been avoiding (at least in the Judge's mind). I noticed that during the fortune telling, the Judge refes to the kid as Blastharius.
I think this un-ambiguity should probably make it into the article, given the above discusion. (193.133.92.229 (talk) 21:15, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: sorry but all interpretations need proper third party sources. Active Banana   ( bananaphone 21:27, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Of course the Judge murdered the Kid 

message: The kid should be noted as a formidable and vicious fighter after his encounter with the bartender (important given the later activities of the Glanton crew). White's crew were irregulars. The kid and Sproule were not the only survivors of White's filibustering expedition. He meets three others at Chihuahua, and the Mexican guide Candelario mysteriously disappeared before the slaughter. Centrepull 10:04, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [resolved] Accuracy corrections made

message: Per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (books), we shouldn't use the subtitle in article names. If no one objects, I'll move the page over to Blood Meridian, and merge the page histories of the two versions.--Cúchullain t/c 19:45, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [resolved] Title

message: This is about the disagreement between me and Cuchullain about whether some details of the plot should be removed from the article. I tried to find a Wikipedia policy about the length of a plot summary but there is none. The only guideline is the generic one about length of an article, and according to that this article is well between bounds. I object to deleting any accurate information from a Wikipedia article because it is "too much". As for any other kind of content, if you delete something you have to give a reason: it is incorrect, non-encyclopedic, point of view, original work, or other motivation. None of this applies to the plot details that you deleted. I don't see how my edits where wrongly formatted, but if they were, just format them correctly, don't delete them. (By the way, you also deleted some content that were already there before my edits.) Eubulide (talk) 19:45, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The plot summary is becoming too long to be useful to the reader. Plot summaries should be limited to the essential details, per WP:PLOT. This article is not as bad as some in that it isn't just plot summary, but contains receptions and analysis sections as well, but the plot summary does need to be trimmed down. There's no rule saying you must cite a policy or guideline when removing material in order to improve the encyclopedia, and that's what I was doing. I did explain myself - we don't need every plot point and detail listed off here. Parts of your edits were formatted incorrectly (you put sentences on their own lines, I assume hitting return instead of space), I would have just fixed it rather than reverting except I didn't think the edits added to the article. Finally, according to the page history I didn't remove anything besides your additions.--Cúchullain t/c 21:05, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: WP:PLOT doesn't state that plot summary should be limited to the essential. It only requires that an article does not consist exclusively of summary. On the other hand, WP:WAF and WP:LENGTH give suggestions on what to do when a section or an article becomes too long: a section should be divided into subsections, an article split into subarticles. If you feel that the summary in this article is too long to be useful, you may split it into subsections about groups of chapters. Nowhere in Wikipedia's guidelines can I found the suggestion that information can be removed only because there is too much of it. In any case, you should give reasons for every deletion, not just erase part of an article indiscriminately. Eubulide (talk) 20:04, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I did give reasons for reverting you both times you did it - that there's no need for all that detail. It's nothing personal. The goal is to transmit an understanding of the book, not to collect every plot point without regard for their importance. WP:PLOT calls for a brief plot summary in terms of a larger article also dissecting themes and meaning - this plot summary takes up far too much space to be useful. There's no way this would ever pass for a Featured Article with a plot summary this long. Splitting the plot section into its article would not be a good idea.--Cúchullain t/c 20:54, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: WP:PLOT states that "A brief plot summary may sometimes be appropriate as an aspect of a larger topic". Notice the "sometimes" and "may be". That this is a strict rule barring longer summaries is just your interpretation. Also your evaluation of when a summary is too long is subjective. On the other hand WP:SIZE clearly states that "Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage; certainly, size is no reason to remove valid and useful information." When information becomes too big to be useful, you should restructure it so that it becomes more accessible, not delete it. Size of the summary will not prevent the article from been featured (can you cite a case in which an article has been denied FA status only on the grounds of length of the summary, and such that the summary was of the same size as Blood Meridian?) Check the many featured articles about video games: they all have lengthy plot descriptions. You will not convince me that a the plot of a video game has more cultural relevance than a literary masterpiece. Eubulide (talk) 09:20, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It looks like this has been resolved at Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Length_of_a_plot_summary at by the current wording at WP:PLOT and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (writing about fiction)#Plot summaries.--Cúchullain t/c 18:56, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Length of the plot

message: With all the discussion of the ending in the main article there are only two short notes about the Epilogue.
I am one of those who finds the ending ambiguous and mysterious all very much like McCarthy's work in this novel and elsewhere.... does not bother me in the least.
Yet, for some confounding reason , which I can not seem to analyze , it seems, to me, that the Ending and the Epilogue are tied together and possibly in some abstract way a solution , or partial solution to the ending. Anyone noted this before?--aajacksoniv (talk) 17:44, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: No, but interested to hear what you have in mind. Post to my talk said if you like. Landed little marsdon (talk) 23:22, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Alas! It may yet come to be , but by damned there seems some connection I cannot figure out, McCarthy seems to have trumped us all, ... , something that seems simple to many, does not seem simple to me. I shall cogitate up on it, but the solution it not forthcoming ... quickly.... --aajacksoniv (talk) 01:30, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Personally I think it's one of the strangest concluding sections in American literature, and it has that quality Bloom calls "canonical strangeness" in one of his books (Genius maybe?)  What we'd need is a reliable source to cite.  I think Bloom himself wrote about it somewhere.  Antandrus  (talk) 02:55, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: He did, as noted above. Famous as he may be, he obviously overstepped himself claiming the kid is certainly killed when the author went extremely far out of his way to avoid making that certain. — LlywelynII 14:22, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Ending - The Epilogue 

message: "The expriest" Tobin is listed in the article as having the first name "Benjamin," without a citation. I don't recall this name appearing in the novel, nor could find it in a cursory flip-though. Does this name appear in the novel at all, or is it from another source, like Chamberlain's book? If it doesn't appear in the novel or come directly from McCarthy, I don't think that we can assume that Tobin the McCarthy character shares a first name with any Tobin that appears in another work, even if we know that the latter influenced the former. --68.222.49.70 (talk) 22:37, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I am also thinking that this is not correct. I don't recall Tobin's first name as Benjamin. I will look into this for a few days. If I don't find it or hear from other editors then I will probably remove it. (two years later). Steve Quinn (talk) 00:24, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: [resolved] Tobin's Name

message: Has anyone commented in a significant source on whether the film should be made?  I'm looking for something like my forum post called "Please Mr. Franco, don't make "Blood Meridian" except that is a forum post so we obviously can't use it here.  Have any significant film/literature critics commented?  175.38.205.106 (talk) 04:41, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I would love to see this novel made into a movie. It would be awesome!--Paleface Jack (talk) 17:33, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

text: Yes, although at this point it's less people filling their wordcount assignments with why it's a bad idea in principle and more with the diverse ways in which the actual attempts to do it have specifically failed over the years. — LlywelynII 14:28, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Film adaptation 

message: The section on the epilogue seems to be original research. Specifically, the guilty lines are: "...apparently in the construction of an extended fence. This cordoning off of territories into plots of land suggests the domestication of the "Old West" and the end of the frontier that came shortly after the events of the novel." and "The images of the epilogue seem to serve as a harbinger of the more ordered and settled civilization which will soon replace the war-torn chaos of the West, with its own rituals and codes very unlike those portrayed in the novel's setting."
The epilogue is of course deeply ambiguous and makes no mention of any of these things. This is strictly interpretive--and totally unsourced. If this interpretation can be found in the critical literature, then it should be presented attributed to the critic and sourced. If it does not then the section needs a total rewrite. 208.101.164.4 (talk) 03:17, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: You're absolutely right. I fixed the problem, hopefully to your satisfaction. Thanks for the note! Binksternet (talk) 05:32, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: [resolved] Epilogue

message: Was there any adaptions of the novel?--Paleface Jack (talk) 17:31, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adaptions? 

message: Substituted at 09:49, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: [resolved] Assessment comment

message: I think it would be prudent to have a section about the attempt(s) to have this novel adapted into a feature-length film. Although James Franco's attempt was unlawful and ultimately died in its crib, I believe its mention is warranted in this article. I mean, hell, there probably won't even be a stand-alone article about a film. DARTHBOTTO talk•cont 01:13, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Go ahead.--Paleface Jack (talk) 18:31, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I kicked things off, but I have to admit that there is a ton of content to include, as this project's been attempted so many times. Baby steps. DARTHBOTTO talk•cont 11:44, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: [resolved] Proposed film adaptation section

message: Hi! I am in a Professional and Technical Editing course and will be working on editing this article over the next couple of weeks. I noticed that there has been discussion involving the length of the plot summary in regards to similar articles and the unspoken Wikipedia rules along this front. Involving the plot summary, I plan to reorganize and rewrite some of the article in order to better facilitate a neutral and concise synopsis as a potential option to edit this section. Additionally, I plan on performing similar edits within the Major Characters section to achieve a holistic summarization that mimics Wikipedia pages of similar content.
I'll start working on the article in my Blood Meridian Sandbox, and it would be great to hear any suggestions or feedback from the community. I'm also interested in discovering if anybody has any more recent information about this discovery and research. Thanks! Sisypheantasks (talk) 16:13, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: [resolved] Article content and organization within plot

message: This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 13 February 2019 and 3 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Sisypheantasks. 
:If this even needs to be called out 3 years later, can't this just be combined with Sisy's comments above? — LlywelynII 14:40, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

message: I made two edits to the article, one for removing the 'Gnostic' association from Jakob Böhme and the second to make his spelling in German. As I'm new to Wikipedia I'm unsure if English Wikipedia articles are supposed to have more anglicized names where possible or not.
As for him being labeled a 'Gnostic' Christian, he was not a Gnostic. He was a Lutheran, more specifically a mystic and more specific still a Christian theosophist. I suppose either of these three labels are fair. Sagacious91 (talk) 11:06, 1 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jakob Böhme