My AP Lit&Comp Prompt: Tailor Made For YOU!

         In the following passage from Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, the Kid has run away from home and is taking refuge from a storm inside of a tent that is holding a church service.

         Read the passage carefully. Then write an essay in which you analyze how McCarthy characterizes human nature through literary techniques that are utilized.


         You ever see such a place for rain?
         The Kid had been watching the reverend. He turned to the man who spoke. He wore long moustaches after the fashion of teamsters and he wore a widebrim hat with a low round crown. He was slightly walleyed and he was watching the Kid earnestly as if he'd know his opinion about the rain.
         I just got here, said the Kid.
         Well it beats all I ever seen.
         The Kid nodded. An enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker had entered the tent and removed his hat. He was as bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close on seven feet in height and he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of God and he seemed to have removed his hat only to chase the rain from it for now he put it on again.
         The reverend had stopped his sermon altogether. There was no sound on the tent. All watched the man. He adjusted the hat and then pushed his way forward as far as the crateboard pulpit where the reverend stood and there he turned to address the reverend's congregation. His face was serene and strangely childlike. His hands were small. He held them out.
         Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an imposter. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises. In truth, the gentleman standing here before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
         Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible.
         On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years -- I said eleven -- who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God.
         A moan swept through the crowd. A lady sank to her knees.
         This is him, cried the reverend, sobbing. This is him. The devil. Here he stands.
         Let's hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery to the rear.
         Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat.
         Why damn my eyes if  I wont shoot the son of a bitch, said a man rising at the far side of the tent, drawing a pistol from his boot he leveled it and fired.
         The young teamster instantly produced a knife from his clothing and unseamed the tent and stepped outside into the rain. The Kid followed. They ducked low and ran across the mud toward the hotel. Already gunfire was general within the tent and a dozen exits had been hacked through the canvas walls and people were pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot underfoot in the mud. The Kid and his friend reached the hotel gallery and wiped the water from their eyes and turned to watch. As they did so the tent began to sway and buckle like a huge and wounded medusa it slowly settled to the ground trailing tattered canvas walls and ratty guyropes over the ground.
         The baldheaded man was already at the bar when they entered. On the polished wood before him were two hats and a handful of coins. He raised his glass but not to them. They stood up to the bar and ordered whiskeys and the Kid laid his money down but the barman pushed it back with his thumb and nodded.
         These here is on the judge, he said.
         They drank. The teamster set his glass down and look at the kid or he seemed to, you couldnt be sure of his gaze. The Kid looked down the bar to where the judge stood. The bar was that tall not every man could even get his elbows up on it but it came just to the judge's waist and he stood with his hands placed flat-wise on the wood, leaning slightly as if about to give another address. By now men were piling through the doorway, bleeding, covered in mud, cursing. They gathered about the judge. A posse was being drawn to pursue the preacher.
         Judge, how did you come to have the goods on that no-account?
         Goods? said the judge.
         When was you in Fort Smith?
         Fort Smith?
         Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?
         You men the Reverend Green?
         Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here.
         I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was.
         They looked from one to the other.
         Well where was it you run up on him?
         I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.
         He raised his glass and drank.
         There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.

Senior Project Remarks

The whole senior project.....fiasco has ended, thank God, without too many casualties. But it could've been better ( I mean, there still WERE casualties, and that is a big no-no). I don't know much about what went on with the other classes, so I can't offer insight (nor criticism) that you should consider for future reference. But I can tell you EXACTLY what you might want to consider for our class. A fatal blow for most of the casualties that occured was that horrible binder. The main thing that I believe went wrong with it is the fact that you made us start on the senior project stuff LAST SEMESTER, and then you tell us, like, 2 or 3 weeks before its all actually due THIS SEMESTER that we STILL have things to do. Most people who have some inkling of a life have understandably forgotten about the dreaded senior project and when you sprung those last steps up on us at, seemingly, the last minute, most of us i'm sure were unprepared mentally if not physically. Can you guess what my suggestion for improvement is yet? Well, i'll tell ya! Have the class do the entire senior project either all at once in a well spaced out manner (time-wise; like 2 or 3 months) or have them do it gradually over the course of the school year. That way the senior project will not be completely, or even partially, forgotten and the students will have time to practice what they know, lose some of the edge off their fears and anxieties, and, at the very least, not be taken by surprise as I felt our class was.