An Analysis of the Death of the Kid in the Blood Meridian Essay

Blood MeridianThe ending of the Blood Meridian is both abstruse and compelling. The setting when the kid first walks into town (pp.324) seems almost too familiar. This town could be any number of different towns located throughout the Midwest, but it seems strangely related to the town of Nacogdoches. The Kid, once thought to be on some sort of migratory movement to the West, has now completed a full circle and has returned to the place of his birth. Birth not in the physical sense of being delivered from his mother s womb, but rather the Kid experienced a rebirth in the form of one of the judge s great clay voodoo dolls (pp.13). Throughout the whole book beginning on pp.14 and ending with his death, the Kid seems to have had his life manipulated in someway or other by the Judge. Like the dancing bear on pp.326, the Kid dances to the beat of the Judge s fiddle. What does the dance mean to the judge though? Its seems as though the dance represents life and life is only good for one thing, war. If one does not offer up himself to the blood of war (pp.331), then that man cannot dance and thus cannot live. Is this why the Kid must die in the end of the book? Because he had chosen to stray away from the fate the Judge had set for him and elect therefore some opposite course (pp.330)? The opposite course the Kid elected for himself was one without pointless slaughter, and meaningless bloodshed. The kid wants desperately to get away from the vast and broken world of the desert and elects to complete his circle instead of staying out west. He chooses his own path out of the desert, one that calls for the largeness of heart (pp. 330), one that deviates from the Judges own empty, barren, and hard heart, whose very nature is stone (pp.330)....

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