Suttree

“In this tall room, the cracked plaster sootstreaked with the shapes of laths beneath, this barrenness, this fellowship of the doomed. Where life pulsed obscenely fecund. In the drift of voices and the laughter and the reek of stale beer the Sunday loneliness seeped away.”

In this quote, McCarthy uses his characteristic poetic language to express a simple concept: We are the company that we keep. Suttree finds community with other men who, like Suttree, are poor, hopeless, and disenfranchised from society. Their social settings may be “cracked” and “sootstreaked,” but life pulses, “obscenely fecund,” implying that life is even more fertile and abundant than in the tidier halls where Suttree grew up.

“Finger coiled, blind sight, a shadow. Smooth choked oiled pipe pointing judgment and guilt. Done in a burst of flame.”

This quote describes the moment Harrogate is shot in poetic imagery. On one end of the gun is the judger, and on the other end is the recipient of the “burst of flame,” a mirror incident to the woman Harrogate killed. In microcosm, the randomness with which one finds oneself on the right or wrong side of judgment is illustrated here.

“That raised the once child’s heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of’s come to pass.”

In this quote, Suttree has a visceral reaction to his mother’s prison visit. Her presence is too painful for him to endure. His child’s love for his mother returns as “agonies of passion,” which highlights the internal pain Suttree is experiencing. He struggles with mortality, both of his own life and of his mother’s. The “love surrendered” in this quote can be read as both the love a mother might surrender for a son who has fallen from her vision for him. Suttree’s reaction here indicates why he avoids becoming too attached to any of the women in his life.

“In the photographs the children appear sinister, like the fruit of forbidden liaisons.”

This quote exemplifies the overlap of darkness throughout the novel. Even children, a symbol of innocence, can “appear sinister.” The thought that these children are “the fruit of forbidden liaisons” implies that children inherit the sins of their parents. Children, therefore, are not innocent—they are immediately intertwined with the darkness of adulthood.

“When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and cursing. The dirty half flayed pig looked like something recovered from a shallow grave.”

In this quote, McCarthy emphasizes both Harrogate’s “ugliness” and the ugliness of the human condition. Harrogate doesn’t know how to strip a pig for food, but his desperation to have and eat the pig is a futile attempt at possession. Metaphorically, this emphasizes his theft; he cannot figure out how to truly have the pig because the pig is not his to possess. The pig has turned into “something recovered from a shallow grave,” which emphasizes the destruction of mankind on nature.

“She came down the steps slowly, madonna bereaved, so grief-stunned and wooden pieta of perpetual dawn, the birds were hushed in the presence of this gravity and the derelict that she had taken for the son of light himself was consumed in shame like a torch.”

McCarthy characterizes Suttree’s perceptions of his estranged wife through religiously exuberant terms to highlight the hurt Suttree, and life, have caused her. She is paralleled with a Madonna to emphasize her lost role as a mother, and her proximity to goodness for having been a mother. Even the birds are hushed because this mother’s pain, the most inherent and deepest of griefs, is overbearing on humans and nature alike.

“Peaceful and sunny in the mid Americas on an autumn day. The dread in his heart was a thing he’d not felt since he feared his father in the aftermath of some child’s transgression.”

McCarthy uses juxtaposition between environment and internal conflict of characters to highlight the despair of humanity and the natural, sometimes paradoxical, connection between humans and setting. The setting here is “peaceful” and “sunny,” but Suttree’s dread is at odds with the beauty of the day. Suttree wants punishment, in a way, because he has done things for which he is ashamed. Suttree’s lifestyle is full of self-flagellation.

“Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”

The characters in this novel are at constant odds with their own mortality. Their lifestyles end in death more frequently than Suttree or the reader would hope, without any proper burial or mourning families surrounding them to remember their lives. There is also peace in death. Death means the end of pain, cold, hunger, and strife. The living are the ones who carry the burden of that pain. Death is therefore another juxtaposition for McCarthy’s existentialist position that death is both beautifully freeing and terrifying.

“Beyond in a yellowlit housewindow two faces fixed aspectant and forever in some domestic vagary. Rapid his progress who petrifies these innocents into stony history.”

McCarthy’s novel is an ode to the people who are marginalized and forgotten by society’s larger narratives. These two faces make a basic picture of life inside a home. Yet these types of average people are petrified “into stony history,” implying that the longevity of human memory will fail to honor the people who lived small lives, lives that are insignificant to everyone else.

“What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?” 

In this quote, McCarthy suggests that true courage comes from falling, not from staying up weakly. Pride keeps people up, and pride prevents people from letting themselves fall. However, people sometimes must hit rock bottom to lift themselves back up. This process, of falling and getting back up, can be seen as more courageous than staying up because it requires more effort and vulnerability.

“Everywhere a liquid dripping, something gone awry in the earth’s organs to which this measured bleeding clocked a constantly eluded doom.”

Harrogate’s journey into the tunnels of Knoxville reveals an underworld of grime and mystery. The mysterious liquids surrounding Harrogate are compared to the seepage of an organ, using imagery to express the idea that man-made structures such as cities and the tunnels underneath them are destroying the earth. Further, the grimy doom of the underground tunnels connotes a sickened system underlying human society.

“The wick toppled and dropped with a thin hiss and dark closed over him so absolute that he became without boundary to himself, as large as all the universe and small as anything that was.”

McCarthy’s novel explores the darkness of loneliness, city life, ostracization from society, and self-imposed exile. In this quote, the deep darkness of the tunnels around Harrogate is literal and metaphorical. The literal darkness of the underground tunnels parallels the depths of darkness in Harrogate’s life and in the universal human experience of life. Harrogate is small and insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe, and rather than live in opposition to that idea, with dignity, Harrogate succumbs both literally and figuratively to darkness.

“Yellow leaves were falling all through the forest and the river was filled with them, shuttling and winking, golden leaves that rushed like poured coins in the tailwater. A perishable currency, forever renewed.”

McCarthy uses imagery in this quote to highlight the natural beauty of Earth. Unlike other forms of currency, such as money or human emotions, the currency of the Earth is forever in renewal. Nature grows, deteriorates, and then grows again. It is one thing Suttree can rely on. The beauty of this renewal is also a symbol of hope and invigoration.

“He was seized with a thing he’d never known, a sudden understanding of the mathematical certainty of death. He felt his heart pumping down there under the palm of his hand. Who tells it so? Could a whole man not author his own death with a thought? Shut down the ventricle like the closing of an eye?”

Although other characters have discussed the certainty of death with Suttree, it is not until he is lost adrift in the mountains that he truly understands the severity of the promise of death. Suttree, like many mortals, wants control over life because he ultimately can’t control the reality of his mortality. Coming to terms with the certainty of his death, and his lack of control over it, is terrifying. This experience places him on a universal level with other people—this internal conflict of death makes Suttree an everyman character.

“He’d lie on his back in the shallows and on these nights he’d see stars come adrift and rifle hot and dying across the face of the firmament. The enormity of the universe filled him with a strange sweet woe.”

McCarthy’s narrative highlights the value of life even in despair. There is still immense beauty in the world, especially in context of the universe. McCarthy celebrates human life despite all its forms of degradation and dehumanization because the universal experience of humanity is its spectacular smallness. This quote highlights a rare but important moment of hope.

“He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me?”

Suttree turns inward to reflect on his internal conflicts and his layers. Suttree is compassionate to others, but there are others that he treats with derision and by shutting them out, such as his family. He has clearly caused pain to others and is dealing with inner demons. Suttree’s question, if he has a monster inside him, is a universal question. Most people wonder about their own capacity for evil. McCarthy’s complex characterization of Suttree suggests that all people are capable of both good and evil.

“Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death.”

This quote reflects the myriad ways that life can go, and how even a seemingly insignificant series of events can change everything. This quote specifically refers to Callahan’s murder, but it extends itself as a universal concept. There were so many ways Callahan’s life and death could have gone. The “bullet that lay already in his brain” implies that Callahan’s life was foreshadowed to be ended with a gun. In coming to terms with mortality and death, Suttree wonders about all the different, seemingly small moments in life that lead to death and destruction.

“He surveyed the face in the mirror, letting the jaw go slack, eyes vacant. How would he look in death? For there were days this man so wanted for some end to things that he’d have taken up his membership among the dead, all souls that ever were, eyes bound with night.”

Even when Suttree is in a relationship with Joyce that is passionate and brings with it a better lifestyle, Suttree succumbs to his depression. He thinks about what he would look like as a dead man, emphasizing his curiosity about death and life after death. Suttree has few people in his life, and if he dies soon, it is likely he may die on his own; in that case, who would bear witness to his death and to his body after death? Rather than deal with that question head-on, Suttree experiments with ideas of his death.

“One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.”

Here, Suttree takes back his previous thoughts of suicide. This is an important moment of character development. Suttree understands that one day he will die, but he decides not to partake in his own death. He was embittered about life, but now he wants to be thankful for it. The “stone in the very void where all would read my name” refers to a tombstone. Suttree refuses to help bring his death upon himself. This is one of the few moments of bright hope in the novel and characterizes Suttree as emotionally and mentally resilient.

“You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.”

Suttree is moved by the ragman’s death. Here, he demands the ragman to maintain his dignity in the face of death because one man can represent all men. In other words, if the ragman dies without dignity, then that is a statement about mankind in general and the uselessness of life. Suttree wants to believe that life has value and meaning. If the ragman can succumb to wretchedness, then everyone can, and Suttree doesn’t want the ragman’s thoughts about life and death to be representative of life and death itself.

“He rode handcuffed through the winter landscape to Nashville. It is true that the world is wide. Out there the open ends of cornfield rows wheel past like a turnstile. Dark earth between the dead stalks. The rails at a junction veering in liquid collision and flaring again silently in long vees. His forehead to the cold glass, watching.”

In a moment of poignant irony, Harrogate is exposed to how beautiful and diverse the world is as he is handcuffed and transported to prison. Harrogate had his freedom and he squandered it in Knoxville because he was too young and inexperienced to understand the consequences of the choices he makes. He learns this lesson while he’s en route to losing his freedom. He can see the promise of the wide world, but he can’t yet embrace it or explore it because he is going to prison.

“Walking down the little street for the last time he felt everything fall away from him. Until there was nothing left of him to shed. It was all gone. No trail, no track. The spoor petered out down there on Front Street where things he’d been lay like paper shadows, a few here, they thin out. After that nothing. A few rumors. Idle word on the wind. Old news years in traveling that you could not put stock in.”

This quote captures the moment that Suttree leaves Knoxville behind. He sheds the abandoned railway track, the river, and the rundown bars and hotels. Suttree’s sense of self became linked with environment of Knoxville, and by leaving Knoxville he can leave that part of himself behind as well. McCarthy’s use of the word “shed” in this quote is especially notable because the act of shedding, such as shedding of hair or of skin, is a biological step in growing a new skin. Thus, Suttree turning away from his old life means that he can start a new one and be a new version of himself.

“Downwind light ocher dust had sifted all along the greening roadside foliage and in the quiet midafternoon the call of a long sad trainhorn floated over the lonely countryside.”

This quote captures McCarthy’s carefully precise and vivid imagery. This quote evicts a beautiful setting that is nonetheless sad and lonely. This quote also emphasizes human interference with nature, as the “light ocher dust” is from the work of carpenters. Human interference, here, can also be seen as part of the beauty of nature. This is the characteristic dilemma of McCarthy’s novel: Does human society interfere with nature? Or is it human nature to interfere with nature, thus making humans part of nature?