“Like some supplicant to the darkness over them all”: The Good of John Grady Cole in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain

Abstract

On reading Cormac McCarthy’s works readers and scholars have been fascinated by the cunning and violent characters that haunt his fiction, notably the “grim triune” of Outer Dark (129), Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, and Malkina. Some might say that, together with McCarthy’s mastery of style and narrative, it is on account of these charismatic characters, all compelling studies in malevolence, that McCarthy’s fiction is best remembered and, others might go further, his literary reputation largely rests. This article advances the complementary idea that McCarthy’s painstaking portrayal of John Grady Cole has an equal, if not greater, appeal. John Grady is perhaps the closest a reader comes to a complete rendering of human goodness acting in the world in McCarthy’s fiction. McCarthy’s endeavor to imagine a virtuous human, hard to find and yet worthy of emulation, far from being reductively two-dimensional or tiresomely didactic, should exert its own claim on his readers’ attention and admiration, because in John Grady’s choices, behavior, and actions, McCarthy presents his readers with his idea of the good. John Grady’s representation of a good life illustrates how arduous it is to strive to live an honest and decent life, free from moral compromise.