Abstract
Cormac McCarthy's natural imagery has always attracted critical attention as a significant aspect of his fiction, since the mere volume of natural descriptions indicates their importance in the texts. However, McCarthy's nature was broadly perceived as symbolic, or as a setting device embedding the works in their Tennessee and Western environments.
McCarthy's natural imagery as such was first thoroughly studied by Georg Guillemin and Dianne C. Luce in their monographs The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy (2004) and Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period (2009).
Since then, other critics such as Andrew Keller Estes explored various aspects of McCarthy's natural imagery and the relationship between the human and non-human world and contributed to discussion on McCarthy's natural environment and its functions in the texts. Following ecocritical theoretical framework of Lawrence Buell who suggests understanding nature and culture as inseparable domains with mutual influence instead of seeing them as isolated counterparts, this paper argues that reading McCarthy's novels with environmental awareness significantly alters their interpretation.
The analysis of McCarthy's method of describing natural environment and processes demonstrates that McCarthy's nature should not be interpreted as purely aesthetic object, but rather as a means of revision of American history, and that his critical stance towards anthropocentrism reveals the ethical orientation of his fiction.