A reading of Blood Meridian (Essay) and The Book Of War (Novel)

[摘要] Two separate texts are submitted towards the degree of MA in Creative Writing. The first isthis essay, A Reading of Blood Meridian. The second is a novel, The Book of War.EssayThe general focus of the essay is the theme of free will in Blood Meridian and the techniqueswith which the narrative elements of character, story, style and voice are deployed to focusthe reader's mind on this theme.The central question: is the meaning, the final message, of Blood Meridian that as individualshuman beings lack agency and that as groups they are shackled to a common destiny?The hypothesis is that Blood Meridian contains significant patterns, oppositions anddialectics, designed to place arguments for and against agency in the mind of the reader, butthat the book's response to the theme is inherently and structurally ambiguous.NovelThe novel was written before the essay. It was written in direct response to Blood Meridianand to the realization that Blood Meridian was a text rooted in history.Like Blood Meridian, The Book of War is based on, grows out of, first person accounts,specifically Stephen Bartlett Lakeman's What I saw in Kaffir-Land (1880) and William RossKing's Campaigning in Kaffirland: Or Scenes and Adventures in The Kaffir War of 1851-1852 (1853). The novel takes characters devolved from Lakeman and places them in King'sjourney through the war. These characters create, around a child called the kid, the socialbackdrop of a coming of age tale.The novel uses its source texts as a lens through which to view, and tell the story of, the Warof The Prophet (Eight Frontier War 1850-53). Readers seeking to answer the question: Why is South Africa a violent society? might find at least part of the answer in the nature of, andthe relationships between, English, Xhosa, Dutch, Khoi and Mfengu cultures in the 19thCentury.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University