"Pain is always new"

Cormac Mc Carthy’s western novels are no conventional Westerns and sometimes hardly recognizable as such. For this reason, literary criticism tends to ignore their generic implications, while theoretical studies of the Western genre rarely include McCarthy’s Westerns in their analyses. This study shows that Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy deserve to be taken seriously as Westerns and that interpreting them with the genre’s conventions in mind can yield important insights. Trying to answer the question why Mc Carthy chose the Western genre as the form for these four novels, this interpretation focuses on violence and narrative technique in Blood Meridian, death and religion in All the Pretty Horses, on how generic conventions generate meaning in The Crossing, and on the intertextual references of Cities of the Plain.