The document provides a detailed summary and analysis of Cormac McCarthy's novel Outer Dark. It summarizes that the novel can be considered a trauma narrative about the protagonist Culla Holme who is haunted by traumatic memories he cannot understand. Culla undergoes a series of trials to try to resolve his trauma, but they inevitably fail because trauma cannot be fully articulated or understood. The novel explores the relationship between eyes and vision as a metaphor for understanding trauma. Ultimately, the novel suggests that while trauma may never be fully resolved, one can still find moments of peace even while living with trauma.

1. Student 1
Terrific Student
Dr. Kim Palmore
EWRT 1C
24 June 2014
Can I Be Cured?
Justice is not as objective as one might imagine. It often fails from its own necessity
when trauma is involved. In her book Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth defines trauma as
follows: “trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in
which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance
of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (15). In other words, memories of traumatic
events repeatedly haunt the survivor because the event has happened too sudden and too
unexpectedly to be grasped what it is. Shoshana Felman, an acclaimed literary critic, finds
connections between justice and trauma literature. According to her, trials and traumas are
similar in that they are both “conceptually articulated” without being properly transmitted and
understood by the people involved (1). Literatures that address trauma is significant because it
strives to “transmit the force of the story that could not be told in the legal trial” and explains
“why the trial, like trauma, will repeat itself” (96). The point is, although trauma cannot be fully
articulated and resolved even in literature, a trauma narrative can illuminate the unintelligible
and thus, unresolvable nature of traumas many people suffer in the real world. For this reason,
Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark can be called a trauma narrative that achieves its purpose. In
Outer Dark, McCarthy tells a story about a series of trials in which protagonist Culla Holme and
other characters’ attempts to terminate his trauma fail repeatedly and necessarily because they
cannot see it or fall silent before giving it a name.

2. Student 2
The story opens up with Culla’s dream that suggests his traumatic psychological state,
but he cannot get away from the horror even as he wakes up because the trauma is not grasped
by the dreamer. In his dream, he finds himself among “a delegation of human ruin who [attends]
[the prophet who claims to make the blind see] with blind eyes upturned and puckered stumps
and leprous sores” (McCarthy 5). These disabled people believe the prophet’s words that they
will be healed before the sun reappears again after the eclipse, but the sun does not return. Culla,
who must have long been traumatized by his past, steps forward and asks: “Can I be cured?” The
prophet answers, “Yes, I think perhaps you will be cured” (5). But the sun does not return. The
crowd starts to get uneasy and direct their despair and anger at Culla, so he “[tries] to hide
among them”, but “they [know] him even in that pit of hopeless dark and [fall] upon him with
howls of outrage” (6). This nightmare mirrors Culla’s frightened mind trapped in the trauma,
albeit he does not know what it is. As an evidence of his confusion, Culla is shaken awake “from
dark to dark” by his pregnant sister, Rinthy, with whom he has had an incestuous relationship.
She gives birth to their child several days after the dream. Neither Culla nor the reader cannot
“locate the starting point of trauma” (Felman 102), but it is evident that he is traumatized by the
compound guilt of the incest, birth of the baby, his abandonment of the baby on the day of its
birth, and the running off of his sister. The baby is, whether Culla has intended or not, picked up
in the woods and raised by a tinker who would hover around that area in the same period. One
clue to the origin of Culla’s trauma is his geographical isolation and loss of kin. Before the tinker
first visits them, “there [has] been no one to the cabin for some three months […] who [would
visit] so remote a place” (McCarthy 6). Moreover, their parents have been dead and Culla and
Rinthy are the only ones in the family, and they have neither been born there nor lived there for
long but in the “past little while” (46). Therefore, it can be assumed that Culla has experienced

3. Student 3
overwhelming events that are traumatic, and those memories have repeatedly haunted him.
Ridden with shame and guilt, the traumatized protagonist embarks on a blind search for his sister
who has gone after the tinker to get back her baby.
A tension between eyes and vision dominates the story, reinforcing the blind nature of the
trauma. Although Culla is among the disabled with “blind eyes” in his dream, he is fully sighted;
however, his vision is compromised both from the absence of light, as symbolized by the
blackened sun, and his spiritual blindness. He is spiritually blind because he does not see the real
purpose of his journey, that is, to understand and heal his trauma. Meanwhile, most people whom
he meets can look at Culla’s guilt, but fail to see the trauma at its core. Two of them play a role
as judges, but they make wrong decisions, such as trespass and murder he has not committed,
because their sights are also distracted by their very abilities to see. However, the following three
types of characters are free from the optical illusion and able to penetrate the darkness: the three
outlaws, the baby, and the blind man. Paradoxically, these people are the ones whose eyes are
not fully abled; the three outlaws reside in the darkness; the baby has lost its one eye; and the
blind man is blind. This paradoxical relationship between eyes and vision creates the tension
between who can see and who cannot see the truth. The tension is not resolved by the end of the
story because the three “insighted” characters fall silent before putting an end to Culla’s rauma,
referring back to the nature of trauma that cannot be spoken or healed.
The three outlaws can see Culla’s trauma and punish him in two major trials, but they do
not give him redemption by articulating the trauma because it is impossible. The three men are
introduced in the beginning of the story with their superhuman-like quality, and they chase Culla
killing most of the people whom he has met in his journey. They can penetrate the darkness
because their sights are numbed from their purposeless, reckless acts of violence. One evidence

4. Student 4
is the description of the leadership among them, the bearded one, whose eyes are like “black
agates” (McCarthy 95) or “shadowed lunettes with nothing there at all” (171). Because he lacks
humanity, nothing distracts his vision from seeing into the core of the darkness, including Culla’s
trauma at the core of his guilt. Also, their major activities take place in the night, and moving in
shadow “[suits] them very well” (3). Their ability to move freely in the darkness suggests that
they are better “sighted” than Culla who is always blinded in dark. Culla and the three men first
encounter at their camp fire into which Culla, who, after surviving through the swollen river, is
lured to get help and warmth. In their first trial, Culla confesses that he is run off from by his
sister, and the three men punish him by forcing him to eat human flesh and exchange his
“jimdandy pair of boots” (173) with their lousy ones. Uncannily, they seem to know so much
about him. For example, they know that the boots is stolen by Culla from the “dead man” (177)
for whom he has worked for a day and that Culla is somehow accountable for and guilty about
his sister’s running off. In contrast, Culla does not know who they are and what he is punished
for. “I think maybe you are somebody else,” the bearded one says to him, “because you don’t
seem to understand me very much” (179). The three men imply their knowledge to the core issue
of the trial, Culla’s trauma, but they either do not or cannot give a name to it. Because the three
men fall silent, the first trial closes ambiguously without any practical resolution suggested to
remedy Culla’s trauma.
Their second trial also fails to terminate Culla’s suffering from trauma because even
though the judges and the baby can see the truth, either of them do not or cannot testify the case
for him. This trial takes place when again, Culla is lured into the three men’s camp fire after
surviving through the threat of hanging on a wrong account of murder. When he recognizes the
source of the light and warmth, “he [is] already among them and it [is] too late” (231), exposing

5. Student 5
to the reader how blinded he is. The men have robbed the tinker, who is now dead, of the
unnamed baby, and submit it as an evidence and or witness in the trial. When Culla insists that
his relationship with the baby is not in their business, the bearded one declares: “I’ll be the judge
of that” (234). Culla does not confess his responsibility toward the baby even as the three men
tell him that they know it is an illegitimate child between him and his sister. In response to
Culla’s answers to their questions, the bearded one says to him: “Never figured nothing, never
had nothing, never was nothing, […]. [You are] looking at nothing at all” (233). He is right,
because Culla literally looks away from the baby who keeps watching him with its one eye and
another “eyeless and angry red socket like a stockhole to a brain in flames” (232). Paradoxically,
this disabled baby seems to be able to see through the core of the trial with the intense stares
because it has witnessed Culla’s crime. As if accusing its father’s denial of his crime, the child
[keeps] watching him” (232) throughout the tiral. Thus, had it been able to speak, the baby could
have testified at least part of its father’s case to help him recover from the trauma. But this
salvation does not happen because the baby is killed by the three outlaws and falls into silent.
With the infanticide of his own child, Culla is again punished for a crime that he does not know
exactly what. Therefore, even with the help of the “insigted” baby, he remains hostage to his
own trauma because it is not properly articulated, and the trial repeats itself.
Culla misses his final opportunity of redemption because of his ignorance in the final trial
with the blind judge, only to remain as a forever captive in the darkness. Years after the second
trial with the three men and his child’s death, Culla meets a blind man “who [speaks] him a good
day out of his constant dark” (McCarthy 239). The blind man insists that he has met Culla in the
opening dream, but Culla does not remember him. The bind man remembers Culla as follows:
“they was a feller leapt up and hollered out that no body knowed what was wrong with. And they

6. Student 6
said it caused that preacher to go away” (241). The blind man must have been one of the
“crippled folks” in the “ruin of human delegation” listening into the prophet. Knowing how
Culla is bullied by the crowd, the blind man says, “I always did want to find that feller, […]. And
tell him. If somebody don’t tell him he never will have no rest” (241). Here, what he has wanted
to tell Culla is not clear, but certainly, he is able to see things more clearly than others. One
explanation to this paradoxical relationship between eyes and vision is implied by the preacher
who has given a salmon to a blind person: “In a world darksome as this’n I believe a blind man
ort to be better sighted than most” (226). In other words, because he is not distracted by the
illusion of the manifest world, the blind man can see the invisible where the truth resides.
Another explanation is suggested by Christopher Metress in his article “Via Negativa: The Way
of Unknowing in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark”: “[the blind man’s] acceptance of his being
and of his relation to the metaphysical” enables him to get away from the desire to recover his
sight and yet to see things in the darkness (153). One striking evidence of his ability to see is
described when he turns and smiles at Culla as he passes through him even though Culla “[waits]
very still by the side of the road” not to be seen by the man (McCarthy 242). The man has been
looking for Culla to rescue him, but Culla is ignorant of this opportunity and waves him away.
The punishment follows. The story ends with an irony where Culla wonders if the blind man
knows the road is going to end with swamps, and thinks “someone should tell a blind man before
setting him out that way” (242). He is too blind to see his own doomed future from which he
could have been rescued had he listened to the blind man. In other words, Culla should be
worried about his own future rather than the blind man’s because the man is the one who can see.
Therefore, because the “insigted” blind man falls silent with Culla’s ignorance, McCarthy les the

7. Student 7
trial fail again and descend the trauma into the future, implying subsequent trials that are to
inevitably fail again.
“Great trials are,” Felman says, “perhaps specifically those trials whose very failures
have their own necessity and their own literary, cultural, and jurisprudential speaking power”
(Felman 166). McCarthy’s Outer Dark is highly evaluated within the literary circle because it
depicts such great trials. The story seems to be nihilistic because that is the way a trauma
narrative should be. Culla’s trials repeatedly and inevitably fail because their core issue is his
trauma, which cannot be testified or confessed. Contrary to this truth about trauma trials, our
justice system often make rather subjective decisions to put an end to a trial, letting alone
whether its core issue is resolved or not. In other words, McCarthy’s trauma narrative powerfully
speaks to the limitation and misunderstanding of the justice system. Moreover, Outer Dark is not
only about the story of the fictional character Culla; it is also our story. As Felman remarks, such
hero as Culla in a trauma narrative is a “portrait of no one and of everyone” (103) because people
in the real world also suffer from trauma and feel like they are in a constant darkness. If this is
the case, Culla’s fate seems to be discouraging to them, but one hope McCarthy leaves them out
of his dark humor is that even as they are blinded by their own traumas, people can still talk of “a
good day out of [thier] constant dark” (McCarthy 239) just like the blind man. In other words,
people can come to term with their traumas and go on their lives as long as they understand the
nature of trauma and accept the fact that they cannot see everything because of it.

8. Student 8
Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996. Project Muse. Web. 16 Jun. 2014.
Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.
McCarthy, Cormac. Outer Dark. 1st ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Print.
Metress, Christopher. "Via Negativa: The Way Of Unknowing In Cormac Mccarthy's Outer
Dark." Southern Review 37.1 (2001): 147. Literary Reference Center. Web. 14 June 2014.