50 pages • 1 hour read
Cormac McCarthyOuter Dark
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 213-246Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 213-216 Summary
Content Warning: This section contains a depiction of infanticide.
This chapter finds Rinthy living with an unidentified farmer. At dusk, she sits curled up on the porch, surrounded by flowers, as the farmer returns from plowing the field. Rinthy doesn’t look him in the eye and says little. The farmer is indignant that she never speaks to him. Finally, she says goodnight.
The farmer sits by a lamp in the dark. He’ll dream all night that he’s back at the plow, overturning the earth behind the mule in an endless cycle. A moth flies to the lamp, and the farmer crushes it with his fist.
In the middle of the night, Rinthy absconds. She pauses at the threshold, “poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief” (215). She sets out along the road. At dawn, she hears a horse approaching and hides in the bushes. A gigantic emaciated black horse passes riderless against the low sun.
Pages 217-232 Summary
Spring comes again, marking a year since Rinthy gave birth. Resting beside the road, Culla hears rumbling in the distance, and a drove of hogs bursts into sight. One of the drovers, Vernon, wades through the herd to the rock where Culla sits. Culla remarks that he’s never seen so many pigs. Vernon says that hundreds of them are mule-foot, meaning they don’t have split hooves like normal pigs. Vernon remarks that despite his profession, hogs are a mystery to him. He wonders if mule-foot hogs are kosher, considering they don’t have the cloven hoof that the Bible associates with the devil. Culla has little to say in response, knowing nothing of the Bible and its prohibitions. Vernon implies that he and the other drovers prefer sex with sows to sex with women. After inviting Culla to camp with them that night, Vernon returns to the herd. Staying on a ridge, Culla follows the clamorous drove.
Soon, the hogs stampede through a narrow valley and off a cliff, falling into the river hundreds of feet below. Culla watches as Vernon is swept over with them while the other drovers shelter in a stand of trees.
When the stampede ends, Culla descends to talk to the drovers. In no rush to corral the remaining hogs, the drovers pass around pouches of tobacco. One of them is Vernon’s younger brother, Billy. He doesn’t want to tell their mother that her son was killed by hogs. Billy accuses Culla of not helping Vernon when he was swept past him, and the drovers turn against Culla, accusing him of provoking the stampede.
A reverend appears over a hill, calling out to the group. He is unkempt and wears octagonal glasses missing a lens. He decides that Culla is lying and did in fact provoke the stampede. Quoting Romans 12:20—“Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord”—he implores the drovers not to hang Culla; however, he keeps mentioning hanging. The reverend believes Culla is possessed by the devil.
The drovers debate whether to throw Culla over the cliff or hang him. They decide on hanging for novelty’s sake (none of them has seen a hanging) and because the reverend protests that throwing him over the cliff wouldn’t be Christian. They begin the 10-mile walk along the river to their camp, where they have a rope. Along the way, the reverend asks Culla about himself but ignores his answers, having decided that he’s evil. Culla accuses the reverend of being an imposter.
The reverend proudly retells his best sermon: A blind man came to him cursing God for his disability. The reverend admonished him that he should thank God for his blindness because only through suffering could he come to love God. The drovers applaud the sermon.
With the cliff now smaller, Culla leaps into the river, injuring his leg on impact. The men decide against pursuing Culla, leaving him to float down the river.
Pages 233-240 Summary
In the sixth and final italicized vignette, the tinker has reclaimed the child for himself. In a clearing, he finds an abandoned fire with the impressions of three men in the grass around it. He lays out the child, and they both sleep. The tinker awakes to the trio grinning down at him.
Limping out of the river, Culla stumbles on the trio around their fire. They appear just as they did before, except now, they have the child, who is alive but burned along half of his body and missing an eye. Harmon laughs when Culla asks whose baby it is. Culla asks what happened to the child’s eye, and Harmon replies that one eye is more than enough; many people with two eyes still can’t see. Indicating the tinker’s body in a tree, Harmon says the tinker probably knew what happened to the child.
The bearded leader remarks that Culla had no trouble finding them again. The leader accuses Culla of impregnating his sister and foisting his baby on the tinker. He then interrogates Culla about what became of his sister. Culla asks the man what he is; the man smiles, saying he’s heard the question before.
The bearded leader orders Culla to hand him the baby. Culla does, saying it doesn’t mean anything to him. Holding the child, the leader asks its name. Culla figures the tinker might have named him. The leader says the child wasn’t the tinker’s to name. The leader draws a knife. Culla makes a final half-hearted protest, but he and the other two watch as the leader slits the child’s throat. The leader hands the child’s corpse to the nonspeaking man, who drinks its blood.
Pages 241-242 Summary
Rinthy comes to the clearing sometime later, which is now burned. In the ash, she finds the tinker’s wares and a tiny, charred ribcage. She doesn’t understand what happened. She waits into the night for someone to return.
The final paragraph of this short chapter describes the decay of the tinker’s body. Vultures and bugs strip his flesh. Vegetation grows through his skeleton: “in spring a new branch pierced his breast and flowered in a green boutonniere perennial beneath his yellow grin” (241). With the years, his bones fall out of the tree, unnoticed by those who pass by, until only his bleached ribcage remains among the branches.
Pages 243-246 Summary
An unspecified number of years passes. On the road, Culla often passes a blind man who looks “ragged and serene” (243). One day, the blind man asks Culla for a cigarette. Culla doesn’t recognize the man, but the man recognizes Culla. Culla explains that he can’t remember the man because there are a lot of people on the roads; the man agrees: “I pass em ever day. People goin up and down in the world like dogs. As if they wasn’t a home nowheres” (244).
The man asks if he can do anything for Culla in the name of God. Mistaking him for a preacher, Culla declines, sneering that as an old blind man, he doesn’t have anything to give anyway. The man says he receives everything he prays for. Culla asks why he doesn’t pray back his eyes.
The man tells Culla of a dubious preacher he encountered who claimed he could cure disabilities. In the midst of a healing session, one man stood up and started shouting. No one knew what was wrong with him, and he drove the preacher away. The blind man wishes he could find the man who shouted. Culla says goodbye to the blind man.
Culla continues along the road in the afternoon sun, passing through a forest reduced to ash. In the evening, the road ends in a desolate swap stretching to the horizon. Returning the way he came, Culla encounters the blind man again. Although he freezes so the blind man won’t notice him, the man nonetheless turns to smile as he passes toward the swamp. Culla thinks that someone should warn the man of the danger ahead.
Pages 213-246 Analysis
This section finds Rinthy transformed by the tinker’s refusal to reunite her with her child. Once vital, Rinthy now appears in darkness, immobile, and surrounded by death. Formerly, Rinthy carried flowers and moved in sunlight, symbolizing her innocence Love as Humanity’s Saving Grace. Now, she appears frozen in her motionless rocking chair, flanked by flowers “curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark” (213). She’s given up on her search for her child, her raison d’être, and thereby become lifeless. When Rinthy absconds in the night to resume her search, she no longer finds symbols of hope but an omen of death in the riderless black horse:
She crouched in the bushes and watched it, a huge horse emerging seared and whole from the sun’s eye and passing like a wrecked caravel gaunt-ribbed and black and mad with tattered saddle and dangling stirrups and hoofs clopping softly in the dust and passing enormous and emaciate and inflamed and the sound of it dying down the road to a distant echo of applause in a hall forever empty (215-16).
This fiery omen of death foreshadows the holocaust Rinthy finds in the glade and highlights the theme of Suffering in Outer Darkness. Just as with the horse, Rinthy doesn’t understand (or cannot accept) the terrible meaning of the burned remains and the “little calcined ribcage” (241) she finds at the end of her quest.
Culla’s experiences in the final sections highlight The Curse of Cain, as he receives increasingly hostile treatment from everyone he meets, and this forces him to continue wandering. In the last of the series of false accusations levied against Culla, the drovers blame him for the stampede, resulting in an discussion of his lynching. The reverend who appears just as the drovers are debating Culla’s execution is unkempt, suggesting that he’s another in the series of suspect men of the cloth (the trio’s leader impersonates a minister in his black suit; the blind man mentions a dubious healer-preacher). The reverend and the drovers’ judgment of Culla is hypocritical: They themselves, who have sex with pigs, could also be described as being consumed by the devil, as the Old Testament condemns bestiality as a sin warranting execution. The reverend and drovers’ scapegoating of Culla is absurd but also right, in a way. Culla is guilty, just not of provoking the stampede, and is “plumb eat up with the devil in him” (227) as the reverend declares, just not for the reason the reverend thinks. The reverend and the drovers are right about Culla’s guilt for the wrong reasons.
In the final chapters, the trio appears with a “dream’s redundancy” (234), suggesting that Culla remains stuck in the same endless cycle of wandering begun in the first chapters. The blind man’s story about the nameless man who drives away the healer-preacher with his distressed shouting resembles Culla’s opening dream. Just as in Culla’s dream—he’s the only healthy person in the crowd of people with leprosy—the nameless man is the only one without a visible disability. Furthermore, just as Culla’s plea to the prophet for salvation disrupts the eclipse, the nameless man’s shouting disrupts the healing session, scaring the preacher away. In his endless wandering, Culla resembles the nameless man who, in his confused distress, can find no peace. The blind man’s enigmatic statement that “If somebody don’t tell [the nameless man] he never will have no rest” (245) implies that some ignorance, linked metaphorically to his blindness, is the root of his problem. This describes Culla’s predicament: He’s blind to the fact that his very avoidance of responsibility for his crimes causes his endless misfortune.
In Culla’s second encounter with the trio, these abiding judges again punish him for shirking his guilt. Confronted with the horrific consequences of leaving his child to die, Culla nonetheless pretends the child isn’t his. He then feigns concern for the child, asking why he’s missing an eye. Even when the leader makes it clear he’s going to murder the child, Culla does nothing to stop him, repeating, “He ain’t nothin to me” (238). Culla wants his child dead but doesn’t want to be the one to kill him. This is why he leaves the child out to die instead of killing him outright and why he does nothing to stop the leader’s knife. The leader does what Culla is too ashamed to do himself, acting as the executor of Culla’s darkest desires.
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