They lack the consolation of interior lives, suffering and surviving with a sort of indistinguishable vacuity. McCarthy's characters tend to be murderers, indigents, liars and thieves relentlessly brutalised by the world, they brutalise one another in turn. But unlike the classic naturalists, McCarthy doesn't consider human beings to be corrupted by the civilisation that contains them instead they are the bearers of their own violent, irrepressible natures. There are times when McCarthy resembles a classic Thirties naturalist like Steinbeck or Lawrence, his characters being commonly mired in the muck and muddle of their own animal identities. McCarthy's world is an existential one in which men face two choices - either to battle or to die the female characters, meanwhile, cook and sew or sell themselves on the street. 'I always figured they was a God,' mutters one of Suttree's Knoxville disreputables. But in McCarthy's novels, it is nature - nasty, brutish and short. In the Old Testament, of course, the surrounding world belongs to God. His characters are not thick, psychologically resonant creations, but are subordinate to the breadth and muscle of the world that surrounds them. His landscapes are wide, blazing and biblical with conflagrations. CORMAC McCARTHY'S formidable prose is indebted to the Old Testament.
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