Suttree

“In my father’s last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.”

This quote immediately introduces tension between Suttree and the metaphorical voice of his father. It implies that Suttree is from a family that is at least of middle-class status, even though Suttree now lives on a houseboat in poverty. Suttree’s father has a capitalistic attitude in which structures of society are important protections for living a meaningful life. Prison, homelessness, or any turning away from society is, in his view, considered a failure. Suttree’s lifestyle is clearly at odds with his father’s philosophy.

“In this tall room, the cracked plaster sootstreaked with the shapes of laths beneath, this barrenness, this fellowship of the doomed. Where life pulsed obscenely fecund. In the drift of voices and the laughter and the reek of stale beer the Sunday loneliness seeped away.”

In this quote, McCarthy uses his characteristic poetic language to express a simple concept: We are the company that we keep. Suttree finds community with other men who, like Suttree, are poor, hopeless, and disenfranchised from society. Their social settings may be “cracked” and “sootstreaked,” but life pulses, “obscenely fecund,” implying that life is even more fertile and abundant than in the tidier halls where Suttree grew up.

“Finger coiled, blind sight, a shadow. Smooth choked oiled pipe pointing judgment and guilt. Done in a burst of flame.”

This quote describes the moment Harrogate is shot in poetic imagery. On one end of the gun is the judger, and on the other end is the recipient of the “burst of flame,” a mirror incident to the woman Harrogate killed.