In 2020 I published an article on the importance of naturalism in Cormac McCarthy’s then most recent novels, No Country for Old Men and The Road. This paper examines the continuation of that trend in McCarthy’s new, linked novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, also considering the connected theme of trauma in these works.
The protagonists of the new novels – siblings Bobby and Alicia Western – are both arguably trauma sufferers, the cause in each case ironically being concern for the other. In Stella Maris Alicia’s various mental health issues are partly attributable to her distress over her brother’s hospitalized, comatose state. The Passenger features a physically recovered Bobby’s reactions to his sister’s mental illness and subsequent suicide. McCarthy’s depiction of traumatised reactions is interesting not least for being of a piece with his representation of character attributes elsewhere in his oeuvre. Alicia and, especially, Bobby’s mental states are not explicitly depicted, but must be carefully inferred by the reader. Such a depiction of trauma defies aesthetic norms which demand that trauma be represented through profound disruptions of literary form designed to illustrate trauma’s ineffable sublimity. These novels instead represent trauma as a constricted emotional dulling, also reflected by the deadpan realism of depiction which achieves an earnest and affecting exploration of trauma’s effects.
Both novels also depict characters enduring the severely restricted freedoms of a deterministic world. In The Passenger Bobby Western is relentlessly pursued by shady agencies, including the IRS, following his discovery of a plane wreck. His life becomes no longer his own as he is ultimately forced into exile. A variety of exterior forces operate on the motley disadvantaged characters he encounters throughout the novel, some of whom endure destitution, alcoholism and death, all of these incidents recalling naturalism’s roots. Similarly, the episode on the oil rig, where Bobby slowly starts to fear for his life, echoes the gothic naturalism of McCarthy’s early career. In Stella Maris, Alicia is likewise overwhelmed by circumstances related to her mental health. Enduring the Foucauldian power structures of a mental institution, Alicia is arguably additionally traumatised through living in the kind of straitened circumstances produced by a highly deterministic universe. That universe is indeed discussed by Alicia in her insistence that all human characteristics and capacity for thought are governed by elements produced through evolution.
This paper aims, therefore, to demonstrate the fascinatingly linked ways in which trauma is depicted in McCarthy’s new novels in part through the employment of tropes familiar from naturalism.