Cormac McCarthy's setting of Blood Meridian is a landscape of infinite and diverse beauty. McCarthy highlights the startling beauty of the combinations of scrubby plants, jagged rocks, and fused auburn and purple colors of the fiery desert that frame this nightmarish novel. Various descriptions, from the desolate to the stagey, showcase McCarthy's highly crafted lyrical prose. Such descriptions of the divine landscape seem to serve a dual function. While being an isolated climax to this macabre novel, McCarthy's magnificent setting also serves as an intricate device to define the novel's themes and create the reality in which it takes place. In addition to the thematic development of the novel, McCarthy's setting and his detailed description of the settings adorning the beauty of the desert southwest deserve praise. A lyrical quality and refined beauty come through in the description of the novel. McCarthy's detailed accounts of the pristine beauty of the desert can be considered an artistic and visually appealing work outside of the novel's plot. Such memorable tales seem to be the sole highlight of an incredibly disturbing book (Moran 37). By noon they had begun to climb toward the gap in the mountains. Climb through lavender or soapweed, under the peaks of Animas. The shadow of an eagle had gone from the line of horsemen below and they looked up to mark it where it rode in that spotless blue void. In the evening they came to a mesa which overlooked the whole country to the north... The mountains of crumpled butcher paper stretched in sharp shadows under the long blue twilight and in the middle of the background the glazed bed of a dry lake s It stretched out sparkling like the imbrium mare. (168) Such a level of development and... middle of paper ...... and there is no limitation of morality or law. A simile of man's fruitless journey is described as "they move like migrants under a drifting star and their trajectory across the earth mirrors in its faint arcature the movements of the earth itself" (McCarthy 153) . Thus, the setting powerfully influences the theme of the novel and its characters rather than being a detached element of the story (147). Cormac McCarthy's brilliant descriptions of the desert southwest landscape in Blood Meridian can be seen as serving a dual purpose. In a sense, they constitute the sole climax of a novel filled with horrific realities. By analyzing the features of the setting and the connections to the plot and theme of the novel, the reader can see that the setting is an essential element for the plausibility of the plot and understanding the underlying meaning of the novel..