Blood Meridian

The kid is the anonymous protagonist of Blood Meridian. While he has no name, he is defined by his proximity to violence. His mother dies in childbirth. He is raised in a violent household, and he escapes from Tennessee only to find himself in a series of increasingly violent and brutal escapades along the border between the United States and Mexico. He is involved in fistfights, knife fights, lynching, war, genocide, and slaughter. Importantly, however, the kid is not disgusted by brutality. Instead, he is shown to have “a taste for mindless violence” from a young age (8). The kid is not an innocent figure who is corrupted by his surroundings. Instead, he is the product of a violent world and does not shy away from the brutality that he sees around him. Rather than avoiding violence, the kid actively embraces his capacity to harm others. He joins White’s unit of soldiers and then Glanton’s gang. In later life, he hires himself out to people crossing difficult terrain because he knows how to inflict violence on others. The kid is defined by his closeness to the ambient violence of the world. Rather than ignore or avoid this violence, he embraces it.