What Does The Ending Of 'Blood Meridian' Mean?

The ending of Blood Meridian is a black hole of vastness and unrest that refuses to reveal its secrets. That final scene in the jakes of the ranch house is pure Theodore, sparse, graphic and utterly dense. The scene reveals Judge Hitchcock, the embodiment of nihilism, to have achieved his ends not only over the person of Thomas McNulty, the protagonist of the novel, but over morality itself. The judge’s word that he will ‘never die’ is a statement that looks to transcend his physical person and all he has done to go on to influence and incite violence long after he has gone the way of all men. It is to be a fixed, invariable factor in human society and it is thus to ‘never die’.

The dance of the Judge is central to this closing scene of Blood Meridian. A twisted, and somehow repellent, dance to celebrate the chaos of war. For it is war, the novel implies, that is the one true God. And this closing scene follows on from the most peaceful of scenes with the Kid in the bar. Here, for a fleeting moment, it seems as though the Kid has found a way to transcend the cycle of violence and blood-lust in which he has become embroiled. But it is not to be. Instead he is drawn back into the Judge’s world of absolute and unadulterated evil. The scene with the Judge in the jakes is not a plot twist. It is a simple and stark statement of fact. The evil that he personifies does not disappear. Instead it changes and adapts to new circumstances. And in the end it is destructive of everything with which it comes into contact. There is no need for a conclusion to this scene. Its ambiguity is part of its disquieting power. And that is why Blood Meridian has such enduring power to disturb and to haunt. It is not a story with a moral. It is a mirror held up to the abyss of humanity’s darkest atrocities.

This is one of the few closing scenes of a novel which has really stayed with me. Like so much of Blood Meridian it is haunting and ambiguous. Rather than a resolution to the novel of the old man in a dimly lit bar facing the Judge once more he is simply left to face him. The final words of the Judge are ‘He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.’ These are chilling. The implication is that violence is an endless cycle which consumes everything in its path, even those who attempt to be outside of it.

This ending is all the more powerful because it mirrors so much of what the book has explored. The Judge is a force of nature; war and chaos personified. His ability to survive, even to thrive, in a world in which violence and bloodshed have reached such grim extremes is a commentary on the nature of evil in the world. He outlasts the Kid, who in some sense was given the opportunity for redemption. Yet the Judge is still there, dancing naked under the moon, his movements endless and relentless. His dance is history. McCarthy’s sparse prose here conveys the full weight of that fact. He doesn’t need to detail the Kid’s demise for us to realize that in the world of Blood Meridian the Judge is the only victor. And his dance will continue long after we have closed the book.

It’s worth noting the ending of ‘Blood Meridian’ leaves a large pit in your stomach for quite some time after. The Judge’s reappearance is utterly shocking and by far the most powerful scene of the book, as this behemothic, goraphopite horror is alive when he could have easily been dead for ages, grinning in the darkness like the devil himself. This is how the Judge got the Kid in the end. In this picture of indescribable horrors McCarthy masterfully conveys the implications of violence in a way to make you shudder, without actually describing it in gruesome details. The merely of the Judge’s words, such as his long-winded monologue about dancing and never dying is not only utterly repellent but also serves as a sort of a thesis to what he said earlier.

I’m struck by the fact that the Kid simply disappears after his long, strange, journeys, never receiving the reward of being a hero or a villain. The Judge wins because he played a rigged game from the very beginning. What I keep coming back to is that the brutal violence that pervades the entire book is not meant to shock or offend. Rather, it is the core of McCarthy’s argument that humanity has the capacity for extreme evil, and that is our normal state. The final image of the Judge dancing naked under the moon is, in a twisted and inexplicable way, just like the rest of the book. There is no closure in Blood Meridian. Instead, the reader is left with a bad dream from which he cannot awaken.