Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned

Patrick O’Connor’s Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned joins several book-length studies that engage philosophical questions in McCarthy’s work. Other recent studies in this vein include Petra Mundik’s A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy (U of New Mexico P, 2016), Ty Hawkins’s Cormac McCarthy’s Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Christopher Eagle’s edited collection Philosophical Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Beyond Reckoning (Routledge, 2017), and Julius Greve’s Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature (Dartmouth College P, 2018). O’Connor advances conversation regarding the philosophical bent of McCarthy’s oeuvre by illuminating in the author’s body of work a “tragic ontology,” or what he calls the “physics of the damned,” which is “a domain of lawlessness affecting the human community” (4). O’Connor’s combined use of materialism and metaphysics in his analysis provides a fresh approach to philosophical interpretations of McCarthy, whereas previous scholarship has emphasized,...