Outer Dark

Blindness reoccurs both as a physical condition and as a metaphor for spiritual affliction. In the final chapter when Culla encounters a blind man on the road, McCarthy uses blindness as a metaphor for people’s ignorance of their fates, despite witnessing obvious signs. Both Culla and Rinthy are ignorant, but in different ways. Culla is morally lost. Shirking responsibility for his crimes makes him ignorant of the role he plays in his endless misfortune: This avoidance condemns him to wander the earth restlessly. Rinthy’s ignorance is her naivete: her innocence prevents her from understanding the horrific meaning of the small ribcage she finds in the burnt glade, condemning her to continue searching in vain for her murdered child.

The narrative begins and ends with images of blindness. In Culla’s nightmare, he’s surrounded by nonseeing people with leprosy. Then his outburst extinguishes the sun, bringing a darkness that makes him blind as well. It’s Culla, not the people with leprosy, who is fatefully affected by this blindness. Unable to see, Culla can’t find a hiding place from the crowd, which turns hostile; however, despite the darkness the crowd identifies Culla: “they knew him even in that pit of hopeless dark” (6). This is because Culla is marked by an evil that surpasses what can be seen with the eyes.

In the final chapter, it is Culla who is disoriented, not the blind man. The blind man is also more aware of his surroundings than Culla: He recognizes Culla, and he notices him later when Culla tries to hide from him on the road. The blind man is equanimous and kind while Culla is restless and rude. Culla sneers that if the man has such faith in prayer, he should pray for his vision; the man responds that knowledge is more important than sight: “Them old eyes can only show ye what’s done there anyways” (243). This again implies that the spiritual world is more important than the world that can be seen with one’s eyes.

Culla does not understand this nuance and still believes himself to be more aware than the blind man: “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” (245). However, it’s Culla who’s lost and doesn’t know it. As Harmon states in his conversation with Culla about his child’s missing eye, vision doesn’t guarantee sight.

Culla encounters the shadowy trio twice. Both times, he crosses a river before finding these demonic figures, echoing the crossing of the river Styx into Hades (the underworld) in Greek mythology. In the hazy realm of the novel, the rivers that appear throughout the story are undifferentiated, melding into one symbolic river.

A number of literary elements hint at the symbolic nature of this crossing. When Culla and the ferryman first embark, the description of the river evokes that of the river Styx: “The river was dark and oily and it tended away into nothing, no shoreline, […] so that they seemed to hang in some great depth of darkness like spiders in a well” (165). Culla is suspended in a darkness suggestive of the liminal space between life and the boundary of the underworld. The ferryman also somewhat resembles Dante’s depiction of Charon—the mythological ferryman of the dead—in his Divine Comedy. Like Charon browbeating reluctant sinners to cross into hell, the ferryman cajoles Culla into crossing when it’s dangerous. After the disastrous crossing, Culla finds himself in hell, confronted by his repressed anomic impulses in the trio. Culla’s two river crossings symbolize a psychic journey into his unconscious, where he’s met by the guilt and impulses he’s been avoiding.