27 works across 28 centuries, back to Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, Daniel) and Iliad.
Following one thread, 7 works from No Country for Old Men to Hippolytus. Back to all 27 works
2007
Film by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Contemporary American cinema. United States. In English.
The Coen brothers' 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel follows a welder who takes drug money from a massacre site in 1980 West Texas, the killer Anton Chigurh who hunts him, and an aging sheriff who cannot stop either. It follows the novel's plot and dialogue closely and stages it with the spare, suspense-driven style the Coens developed in their earlier crime films.
2005
Cormac McCarthy
Contemporary American. United States. Written in English.
McCarthy's crime novel set in 1980 West Texas, alternating the chase between Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh with first-person monologues by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.
Direct source, well documented.
The film adapts McCarthy's novel closely, keeping its plot, its title, much of its dialogue (including Chigurh's coin-toss scene at the gas station) and Bell's closing account of his dreams. The Coens cut most of Bell's interior monologues and Moss's encounter with the teenage hitchhiker but preserve the novel's decision to have Moss die offscreen.
1985
Cormac McCarthy
Late twentieth-century American. United States. Written in English.
McCarthy's novel of the Glanton gang of scalp hunters on the 1849-50 borderlands, dominated by the philosophizing, apparently unkillable Judge Holden.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
Chigurh descends from Judge Holden: both are near-supernatural killers who explain their violence as the working of fate or necessity. No Country moves Blood Meridian's borderland violence into the 1980 drug trade and asks the same question about whether evil in the region has ever changed.
1929
William Faulkner
Southern Renaissance. United States. Written in English.
Four-part novel of the decline of the Compson family, told through three brothers' streams of consciousness and a final third-person section.
Stylistic influence, probable.
McCarthy's early novels were edited by Faulkner's editor Albert Erskine and were widely read as Faulknerian. Blood Meridian keeps Faulkner's ornate vocabulary, long periodic sentences and sense of a violent Southern and Western past.
c. 1606
William Shakespeare
Jacobean. England. Written in English.
Tragedy of a Scottish thane who murders his king and is undone by guilt and further killing.
Direct source, well documented.
Faulkner took his title from Macbeth's speech on life as 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' The first section is narrated by the mentally disabled Benjy.
c. 50
Seneca
Early Imperial Rome. Imperial Rome. Written in Latin.
Seneca's tragedy of Phaedra's passion for her stepson Hippolytus, full of rhetorical speeches on guilt and pollution.
Stylistic influence, probable.
Macbeth's cry 'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?' echoes Hippolytus's lament in Seneca's Phaedra that no river could cleanse him. Seneca's tragedies of guilt and bloodshed were standard reading in Elizabethan grammar schools.
428 BCE
Euripides
Classical Athens. Classical Greece. Written in Ancient Greek.
Athenian tragedy in which Phaedra's love for Hippolytus leads to false accusation and his death through his father's curse.
Direct source, well documented.
Seneca reworked the plot of Euripides' Hippolytus, though he made Phaedra declare her passion to Hippolytus in person. He replaced Greek choral drama with long rhetorical speeches.
The line stops here: drawn from oral myth of Theseus and Hippolytus with no surviving earlier text.
