Finished Blood Meridian last night. I don't have anything too earth shattering to report since I don't understand the ending any better than anyone else does. The last couple of chapters and the epilogue are much more thematic and I am tempted to read them allegorically. There's a strong feeling that the kid died much earlier in the story, and the final sequences with the buffalo hunters, the kids, and finally his meeting with the judge at the dance hall represent stages of a doomed journey into the Manichean afterlife. The world is evil. Human beings are inherently violent. Massacre or be massacred is the sum of its politics. The nature of the soul and the world beyond this one are unknowable and beyond our understanding. In this life we have only struggle and suffering. The judge himself is revealed to be some sort of horrific Dionysian god. Having given himself completely to war, ritual and bloodshed, he seems to represent a force of pure will, bent on the destruction of all things. He does not live in the world, he devours it and nothing exists fully until the moment he extinguishes it.
The kid, it seems, is supposed to be a counter-force to all of that. Someone who lives, survives, has the ability to feel pity for others. He's a member of the gang, but not the author of its worst deeds. He resists and stands against the "craziness" of the judge. He should be someone we can pin our hopes on. But he has no will of his own, no drive, no greater ambition. He doesn't really have any inner life or the capacity to think abstractly - all of these things belong to and are consumed by the judge. So in the end, he is our everyman, but really, no better than a gut-shot dancing bear. He lives, but he knows not why. He dances, but not because it is joyful. He is killed simply for being stupidly, pointlessly alive.
The ambiguity of the ending is potentially the novel's undoing. Whatever happens to the kid, it is something like an annihilation. One can imagine some sort of Saw/Hostel movie type scenario, but you have to question the sudden discretion on the author's part. After three hundred pages of blood and gore, why tip toe around the kid's fate? At least with the bear you felt bad for the little girl who loved him. With the kid, the reader is let off the hook. We're freed in the end, to feel nothing for the kid. We are released from our investment in him as a character. He disappears and the judge lives forever. It's a vampire tale disguised as a western.
