Chapter 1, Would You Have Congress With It?

First of all, this chapter confused the crap out of me at first, but I think I somewhat understand what's going on. I don't really like how McCarthy refuses to use any quotation marks or apostrophes. The lack of those are both confusing and extremely annoying. Sure it may look better without them, but then it makes it difficult to tell if someone is saying something or if it's just happening. They're around for a reason.


McCarthy starts the chapter talking about the main character known simply as "the Kid", and seems to go in detail about his life, but I had to dig a little to find some of it. From what I got out of it, the Kid was born in 1833, hence the "Thirty-Three" in the second paragraph of the first page. The Leonids that were mentioned was a meteor shower which I had to look up. The kid seems to love violence, as shown later in the chapter when he got in a fight with a random guy for no apparent reason.

This chapter is a little slow to read at first but gets better along the way, probably because of the violence. I think the Judge character is shown as a person who is cold-hearted though, because he just walked into Reverend Green's sermon and just basically denounced him and spread all these ridiculous lies about Green having congress with both a goat and an eleven year old girl. Then later on the guy just says, "I never laid eyes on the man before today".

What I think McCarthy was the most effective at was writing about the Kid and Toadvine meeting. The only part that was confusing was where he was fighting the man who wanted him out of his way on page 9. At the part," But someone else was coming down the lot... He reached the kid first and when he swung with the club the kid went face down in the mud." I don't know which of these guys is Toadvine, because McCarthy keeps listing people as the man or the woman, and not giving many of them names. But when he does meet Toadvine, they burn down this hotel to get this guy named Old Sydney, with a really interesting and violent scene.

All in all, if this chapter was a little less confusing it'd be great. The last part is definitely better than the first in my opinion.