Meaninglessness, Indifference, Suicide, and Incest: The Philosophical Pessimism of Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris

ABSTRACT While pessimism has long been a central theme of the scholarly engagement with McCarthy’s oeuvre, Stella Maris and The Passenger offer his first full-throated defense of philosophical pessimism, Alicia Western’s principled insistence on the objective meaninglessness of existence and the indifference of the universe to human life the basis for her understanding and critique of mathematics, language, consciousness, madness, suicide, and the optimistic, common-sense view of reality. Read alongside the work of philosophical pessimists such as Thomas Ligotti, Eugene Thacker, Joshua Foa Dienstag, and Authur Schopenhauer, this article shows how philosophical pessimism offers, for McCarthy, a roadmap for thinking through how humans ought to live, as well as a fundamental critique of Western culture. Hence, this article shows that one finds in Alicia’s philosophical pessimism a continuation of McCarthy’s career-long critique of Western culture, as pessimism is shown to be at the very core of McCarthy’s philosophical and literary project.