McCarthy's writing style is Faulkner-influenced but his concerns are more universal than Faulkner's, addressing universal themes like those in Dostoyevsky rather than regional themes.

Indians are not monolithic—different tribes like the Apache and Comanche were enemies, with the Comanche nearly destroying the Apache in the 19th century.

The light in Blood Meridian is 'grayish'—not pitch black but not the light of the sun either, more like dusk or moonlight, appearing in the final vision of civilization imposing rational order on nature.

While Freud says civilization has its discontents, McCarthy's point is that the lack of civilization has far greater discontents—the state of nature is characterized by genocide, bloodshed, and suffering on a scale worse than civilization's problems.

McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian after moving to New Mexico, where he was interested in the mixing of cultures and the horrifying and brutal circumstances by which civilization was imposed on indigenous peoples and nature.

The judge's white suit makes him stand out visually in the American desert and irises him as representing purity in an ironic sense—the novel associates whiteness with innocence, but the judge wears this color while committing genocide and other atrocities.

There is ingratitude in those who constantly criticize civilization without recognizing how much they have gained from it that they did nothing to earn—benefits like lack of intestinal worms, low infant mortality, and absence of blood feuds.

The novel depicts a clash of civilizations during the Mexican-American War period (1840s) with an epilogue set in 1878, using this historical setting to explore themes of conquest, violence, and the encounter between different cultures, none of which are presented as morally superior.

Before Europeans arrived, Indians were not lacking in imagination regarding awful things to do to each other—when Europeans came, they simply added to the mix and brought diseases, but the pattern of violence and cruelty was already present.

Blood Meridian contains an epigraph noting that in Ethiopia a fossilized skull was found that was 300,000 years old and had been scalped, suggesting that violent human non-human violence is not something new but is built into the human condition.

McCarthy's presentation of morality in Blood Meridian reflects a Foucauldian moral chaos where right and wrong do not exist—only power exists, and the weak are consumed by the strong.

McCarthy's prose style in Blood Meridian reads like Faulkner with beautiful flowing clarity and transparency not often broken up with punctuation, creating very long and powerful sentences with a gravity and biblical weightiness.

Blood Meridian is a Bildungsroman (novel of development/education) where the anonymous protagonist 'the Kid' undergoes violent self-preservation but maintains some capacity for mercy, setting him apart from other characters like the Judge.

The Judge in Blood Meridian is more than an American image—he is a terrifying universal image of evil comparable to Milton's Satan or Faust's Mephistopheles, functioning as an adversary not just to humans but to God itself.

The Judge announces 'war is god,' expressing a philosophy where war is the ultimate reality and the mechanism through which power and meaning are generated.

The Judge believes he allows the universe to exist by his sufferings and keeps a blank notebook in which he copies and illustrates things, thereby giving them the ability to exist, resenting anything that exists outside his ken.

The Kid finds a frozen Bible in the pack of a frozen couple and chooses to take it despite being illiterate, suggesting he has escaped the Judge's crushing moral gravity and is no longer a candidate for becoming a small version of the Judge.

Blood Meridian shares thematic concerns with Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange: both are concerned with the problem of evil and the impossibility of medicalizing or treating evil as a religious question that can be solved through institutional means.

Religion does not have any way of explaining evil—evil is a simple brute fact, and the harder we try to create an understanding of it through religious frameworks, the more impossible the task becomes.

The Judge cannot be killed because he represents a permanent feature of human life—evil and death are eternal forces that cannot be eliminated.