45 pages • 1 hour read
Cormac McCarthyA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The wilderness of The Orchard Keeper is chaotic and untamable. Caught out alone among this wilderness, the people of Red Branch develop ways of rationalizing and comprehending the world around them. The legend of “wampus cats,” for example, transmutes a fearsome natural predator (mountain lions) into a supernatural one while also holding out the possibility that such violent forces can be controlled: According to the woman who told Arthur the story, some people have mystical “vision” that allows them to see the cats. Other assertions of human control are more straightforward; hunting and trapping are acts of dominance that prove humans can bend nature to their will.
However, the wilderness continually thwarts human attempts to contain and control it. Modern human impositions on the natural world eventually succumb to it. The Green Fly Inn, for example, teeters precariously over a gorge in defiance of gravity. For all the memories and stories associated with the bar, its existence cannot be supported. Eventually, it falls and burns, and the human-made remnants become fossils—an “archeological phenomenon”—absorbed into the natural world. Nature thwarts humans through destruction, slowly rotting Kenneth’s body in the pit or turning the orchard fruits inedible.
By Cormac McCarthy
All The Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Child of God
Cormac McCarthy
Cities of the Plain
Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy
Outer Dark
Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris
Cormac McCarthy
Suttree
Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing
Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger
Cormac McCarthy
The Road
Cormac McCarthy