Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark

How does Holme’s inner darkness affect the outer darkness in the novel?

Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark offers evidence that human failure to acknowledge their sin can leave them to wander in a purposeless and unforgiven condition. Culla Holme has committed a sin against nature having incest with his sister and abandoning their child in the woods. His inner darkness manifests itself resulting in bad circumstances wherever he goes. The unfortunate events Holme encounters are nature’s way of informing him to repent of his sins. During his journey, Holme comes across three unholy characters who could be interpreted as the personification of Holme’s inner darkness. Holme refuses to renounce his sin, thus he is blind to his inner darkness and continues to wander endlessly, spreading outer darkness.

In constructing this essay, I used my Nikon D5200 to take my photos. I decided to take photos instead of the video essay because I am an aspiring photographer. My current major is digital art and I hope to one day own a photography business. I feel that this essay exercised my ability to arrange subjects in a photo not only to be aesthetically pleasing, but also to build a connection between the novel and the image. I started this essay by evaluating the book for excerpts to support my argument that inner dark contributes to outer dark. After discovering the quotes I would use, I experimented with photos that I could use for the essay. I assessed each quote to determine settings and subjects for my photos. Once I had taken the photos, I used photo editing software, included in my computer, to touch up the photographs to perfect the sensation I wanted my readers to experience when viewing the images. I believe a photographic presentation provokes deeper though from the reader than verbally expressing my opinion on a video.

“… grouping for a moment … in silhouette against the sun and then dropping under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow … and they moved in shadow altogether which suited them very well” (McCarthy 3).

For the first image, I wanted to show the connection between the three unholy characters and death. My mind directly envisioned headstones rising from the ground in the late afternoon. When I arrived in the cemetery, I immediately saw these three headstones which crested over the hill. The sun casted a beautiful silhouette of the headstones. This image is reflecting the accompanying text, but instead of the three unnamed figures, there are three symbolic figures of death.

“Now the dreamer grew fearful. Voices were being raised against him … They grew seething and more mutinous and he tried to hide among them but they knew him even in that pit of hopeless dark and fell upon him with howls of outrage” (McCarthy 6).

For the next image, I wanted the viewer to grasp the foreshadowing of the townspeople’s hatred and wariness for Holme wherever he went. Their outward appearance may be polite, but inwardly they were against him. Holme’s dream is also a foreshadowing of the horrible events he met on his travels.

“With full dark he was confused in a swampy forest, floundering through sucking quagmires … careering through the woods with his hands outstretched before him against whatever the dark might hold. Until he began to stumble and a cold claw was raking upward through his chest” (McCarthy 16–17).

In the third image, nature has turned against Holme for abandoning the baby. This scene shows Holme’s denial of his inner darkness and thus he is blinded to the light in the rest of the world. In my photo, I wanted to indicate the connection between his physical blindness and his mental blindness and how nature is physically holding him back.

“He crossed at the shallows above them with undiminished speed, enclosed in a huge fan of water, and plunged into a canebrake on the far side … He crashed on blindly” (McCarthy 89).

The fourth image is a progression of his blindness as Holme continues to ignore the darkness inside him. No longer is he mentally blind, but the text reads he is physically blind. I wanted to put the viewer in Holme’s point of view to experience his fear and frustration of not being able to see as he is running away from his attackers. To create this effect, I slowed my shutter speed and slightly moved my camera to create the blurry image.

“And in the glare of the torches nothing of his face visible but the eyes like black agates, nothing … he wore gloss enough to catch the light and nothing about his hulking dusty figure other than its size to offer why these townsmen should follow him along the road this night” (McCarthy 95).

In the next picture, I wanted to express the immense character of the bearded one. The bearded one is the manifestation of evil and may be seen by some viewers as the devil. To depict his overwhelming outer darkness, I cast him as a silhouette against the fading light sky. He takes up most of the picture to represent his ever-presence in Holme’s life.

“His assassin smiled upon him with bright teeth, the faces of the other two peering from either shoulder … a grim triune that watched wordless … He reached to put one hand on the doorjamb. He took a step backwards as if to let them pass” (McCarthy 129).

In the sixth image, I made the connection between the three unholy characters with the devil by insinuating that the old man was offering a drink to the trinity because he said, “I wouldn’t turn Satan away for a drink”(McCarthy 127). I chose to show a spilled drink as it represented the loss of the old man’s gracious offer to the evil trio.

“As he did so a man rounding the corner leaped back and began to scream at him … Cholera? Cholera? Hell, it weren’t nothing but a mouthful of corn … I’d shoot a man went around with the plague like ary mad dog, the man said” (McCarthy 137–138).

For this next image, I wanted to connect Holme’s inner darkness with the old corn. The man in this scene is afraid of Holme’s potential sickness; ironically, Holme is sick with darkness. The corn in this picture is a symbol of his rotten center.

“He worked until nightfall and then a little later. He was beginning to feel lightheaded and his empty belly had drawn up in him like a fist. He worked on for a while in the dark and then he quite” (McCarthy 145).

The eighth image is an ironic metaphor for Holme’s job to dig a grave for money so that he could continue to wander endlessly. He continues to ignore the sins he has committed making his life futile without repentance. Figuratively, the grave he is digging is his own.

“A black fog had set in and he could feel it needling on his face and against his blind eyeballs” (McCarthy 166).

His journey continues into the ninth photo where he is left helpless on the ferry after witnessing yet another disastrous event. He sinks even further into acceptance of his inner darkness as seen by him holding the hands covering his eyes. The faceless hands represent Holme’s outer darkness blinding him from the light which is good.

“Holme looked at them. They were mismatched, cracked, shapeless, burntlooking and crudely mended. He looked at the nameless one who sat likewise … Holme looked away” (McCarthy 180).

Holme has just met the three unholy characters for the first time. This next photo is of the moment he is forced to trade boots with the ape-like man. The ape-like man can be seen as the character who is most like Holme because they are both oblivious to their own actions and surroundings. I decided to show the gruesome boots Holme has to wear in a nice box. The box represents Holme’s outward appearance and congeniality to strangers, but the mangled old boot is a symbol for how Holme’s soul looks on the inside.

“He took hold of the mattress and pulled it from the bed and dragged it to the door … long bright red beetles coming constantly from beneath the cat to scatter in radial symmetry outward and drop audibly to the floor” (McCarthy 196).

This next image also suggests what Holme looks like on the inside. The excerpt from the novel is of Holme removing a dead cat who looks peaceful on the outside, but as soon as he starts to move the mattress bugs emit from the cat showing it’s rotten interior. I decided to use gauze to indicate Holme’s wounded soul and bugs to symbolize his internal decay.

“Holme saw tilted upon him for just a moment out of the dust and pandemonium two walled eyes beyond hope and a dead mouth beyond prayer … seized sevenfold in the flood of his own nether invocations or grotesque hero bobbing harried and unwilling on the shoulders stricken in their iniquity … until he passed over the rim of the bluff and dropped in his great retinue of hogs from sight” (McCarthy 218).

In this image, I wanted to show the effects that Holme’s sin caused in the situations he faced. Everywhere he went, chaos occurred. Holme started the trend by sinning against nature which led to the death of an innocent by a hoard of hogs. I used dominoes to illustrate Holme’s unconstrained sin contributing to the growth of outer darkness.

“The preacher looked like a charred bird. He was peering at the ground and pounding his cane there. Ah don’t hang him, he said” (McCarthy 222).

Shortly after the hog’s stampede, Holme is blamed by the drovers and they come across a preacher. The thirteenth image depicts the preacher unintentionally giving the drovers the idea to hang Holme. I connected the preacher’s cross with the noose by a single rope.

“Holme looked about, stepped past the preacher and the drover next to him and jumped. It was a long way down and when he hit he felt something tear in his leg. He came up with a mouthful of muddy water and spat and turned” (McCarthy 226–227).

Holme escapes his death by jumping off a cliff into the river. The river is symbolic of Holme’s final acceptance of his darkness. In Christianity, you are baptized as a profession of your faith. Holme jumps into the river to escape the punishment for his sin, thus he is being baptized for evil. After arising out of the river, he is greeted by the unholy trio one last time. I took a picture of a baptismal pool to represent Holme’s profession of evil. I used a white sheet and a dark sheet to represent the parallels between a Christian baptism and Holme’s evil baptism.

“He waited very still by the side of the road, but the blind man passing turned his head and smiled upon him his blind smile … He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way” (McCarthy 242).

To finalize my photo essay, I wanted to depict Holme’s endless wandering as a punishment for his sin. He is covering his own eyes this time to indicate that he is inflicting this upon himself and causing him to head in the wrong direction. I used this last image to show that when we fail to acknowledge our own evil, we will wander aimlessly.