Character Clues

Character Analysis

Appearances

Toadvine has no ears and three letters burned into his face—and they don't even spell anything out. So yeah, he probably hasn't spent his life working as an English professor. The guy's been an outlaw forever and he has the marks to show for it. In contrast, a character like Judge Holden is a completely blank surface. There are no marks or even hairs on his entire body, which makes it impossible to judge from his appearance who he is or where he has come from—except that he's probably not good news. You can bet dollars to donuts that McCarthy is always telling you something symbolic when he describes a character's appearance, because he sure isn't going to have a character break down and tell you his life story. His dudes are too tough for that.

Thoughts and Opinions

Okay, so you don't get many characters in this book sitting down and telling you what they think of the world. But the judge is one major exception to this rule. On several occasions, the judge gathers men around him and explains how the whole point of human existence is to destroy one another and to make way for the strongest and most heartless. He was onto Darwin's whole survival of the fittest thing, that's for sure. That's the only way progress will ever happen in the judge's eyes, and his opinions make up a huge part of this book's message. Just run a quick Google search on "The Judge's opinions in Blood Meridian" and you're bound to find all kinds of people who want to discuss and debate the judge's ideas.

Actions

At one point in this book, Judge Holden buys two puppies from a young boy and chucks the puppies in a nearby river. Then another guy from the same gang pulls out his revolver and uses the floating puppies for target practice. So yeah, McCarthy is telling us in a not-so-subtle way that these men enjoy cruelty for cruelty's sake. The kid, on the other hand, does his best to show compassion to the people around him. But it's this compassion that eventually turns the judge against him and probably gets him killed.

Occupation

It's fair to assume that Judge Holden has actually been a working judge at some point in his life. But the more we learn about him, the more we realize that don't know anything about the guy's past. When the kid asks what Judge Holden is a judge of, he gets shushed by Tobin. And that's really all we hear of it. On top of that, everyone in Glanton's gang makes his living by killing Aboriginal people and selling their scalps to the Mexican government. You're not going to find any charity workers in Blood Meridian. Everyone in this book is cut-throat, which you can see in the types of jobs they tend to take on.