Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

First published: 1979

Type of plot: Impressionistic realism

Time of work: The early 1950’s

Locale: Knoxville, Tennessee, and the surrounding area

Principal Characters:

• Cornelius Suttree, also called
• Buddy, or
• Scout, the protagonist, a fisherman who lives near McAnally Flats in the slums of Knoxville, Tennessee
• Gene Harrogate, the devious “country mouse” whom Suttree befriends
• Abednego (Ab) Jones, the black proprietor of the local tavern
• Leonard, a male prostitute
• Harvey, a drunken junkman
• Michael, an Indian fisherman
• Reese, a shellfish scavenger and patriarch of a large river family
• Wanda, Reese’s daughter and Suttree’s lover
• Willard, Reese’s son
• Boneyard,
• Hoghead,
• J-Bone, and
• Blind Richard, other residents of McAnally Flats

The Novel

Suttree takes place during the early 1950’s in the slums of Knoxville, Tennessee. Cornelius Suttree, who comes from a prominent family, has abandoned his wife and infant son and has chosen to live on a houseboat near McAnally Flats, among the drifters and derelicts of the town. He keeps himself alive by fishing in the filth of the Tennessee River, but his existence is apparently meaningless, given over to destructive drinking, fighting, and carousing. As the narrator explains in the introduction to the story, “We are come to a world within the world. In these alien reaches, these maugre sinks and interstitial wastes that the righteous see from carriage and car another life dreams. Ill-shapen or black or deranged, fugitive of all order, strangers in everyland.” When the story begins, Suttree is an accepted part of this other world. He shares bottles, stories, and jail cells with the “ruder forms” that inhabit the region. They recognize that Suttree is different, has had opportunities denied them, but they never question his decision to live among them. To them, he is simply “old Sut.”

There is no conventional plot line in Suttree’s story. Rather, the reader follows him through apparently random experiences. The book is thus constructed in episodic fashion and depends on the cumulative effect of these episodes to develop its structure and identify its theme. Some characters come and go, touching Suttree only for the moment. Others, however, form a constant in his life, forcing him to come out of his self-imposed isolation and renew, in however meager a fashion, his connections with humanity.

Although the book is large and its contents rich and varied, several episodes do stand out as significant events in the sweep of Suttree’s life. While in prison for having taken part, unintentionally, in a robbery, Suttree meets Gene Harrogate, a sly but often foolish country boy who later follows Suttree back to Knoxville to become part of the marginal world of the outcasts. Although Suttree tries to avoid being involved with Harrogate, he often finds himself drawn into the boy’s mad schemes, and on occasion has to rescue the boy from his craziness. Other characters from McAnally Flats also place demands on Suttree’s humanity despite his best attempts to deny them, and he forms special relationships with a number of the doomed inhabitants of the region. Among them are Ab Jones, a giant black man who fights constantly with the police; an old ragpicker, whose wisdom and stoicism Suttree admires; the Indian named Michael, who offers Suttree a quiet and dignified friendship; the pathetic catamite Leonard, who involves Suttree in a grotesque scheme to dispose of the decaying body of Leonard’s long-dead father; the comic, bizarre family of shellfishermen who entice Suttree, despite his better judgment, away from Knoxville to the French Broad River with the promise of pearls and adventure; and the whore, who takes Suttree to live with her and employs him for a time as her moneyman.

Although Suttree’s experiences are often horrible and degrading, the book ends with at least the possibility of hope. Nearly dying of typhoid fever, Suttree faces in his lengthy delirium the waste and cowardice of his life. When he recovers his strength and returns to McAnally Flats, he finds most of his companions either dead or absent. In his own houseboat, he discovers the rotting corpse of some unknown figure who has usurped his very home and identity. In death, however, there is new life, and Suttree leaves Knoxville, breaking with his past. His destination is unspecified. As he stands by the side of the road, a mysterious boy offers him a drink of water and smiles. Then a car stops for him without his making the effort to flag it. Both acts are, in one sense, minor, but they are also acts of grace.

The Characters

Cornelius Suttree is at all times the focus of this novel, but Cormac McCarthy gives the reader only a sketchy sense of how and why he has broken with his family, left his wife and child. Suttree is a lapsed Catholic born with a sense of guilt. His twin brother died in birth, and Suttree questions why he was chosen to live. “Mirror image. Gauche carbon. He lies in Woodlawn, whatever be left of the child with whom you shared your mother’s belly. He neither spoke nor saw nor does he now. . . . He in the limbo of the Christless righteous, I in a terrestrial hell.”

Although Suttree’s parents are alive, he refuses to have anything to do with them. While at the University of Tennessee, he met and married a mountain girl by whom he had a son, but he has returned her and the child to her family. Near the beginning of the book, he learns that the child has died, but when he attempts to go to the funeral, he is attacked by his wife’s mother, mad with grief, and then run out of town by the sheriff. His life is a series of self-imposed failures. He dooms himself, invites his own destruction as a kind of just punishment. He also gives of himself, however, and in doing so acknowledges his humanity.

The character that stands in opposition to Suttree is Gene Harrogate, the country boy who is put in prison for sexually molesting watermelons. Harrogate is a perverse and comic character, thoroughly dishonest and without common sense, a fool whose grandiose plans always end in ruin. He, in fact, may remind the reader of Sut Lovingood, the “natural born durn fool” of Southwest humor. Harrogate’s most spectacular scheme is to find his way through the tunnels under Knoxville to a bank, and there to dynamite his way into the vault. Instead, he blows up a sewage retaining wall and is almost drowned by the muck that is released. Only Suttree notices his absence, and only Suttree spends time, day after day, in an attempt to find the boy lost in the darkness under the earth. It is, symbolically, a search for his dead brother, his dead son, his own soul.

Ultimately, Harrogate cannot be saved from his greed and stupidity. Despite Suttree’s warnings, he attempts another robbery and is sent back to prison. Indeed, all of the characters Suttree comes in contact with seem doomed. While living with the family on the French Broad River, gathering shellfish and looking for pearls, Suttree has a romance with the oldest daughter, a girl named Wanda. Although Suttree is ashamed by his consuming lust for her, their relationship is the closest to a loving understanding that he has. When Wanda is killed by an avalanche of slate rock, Suttree once again returns to his isolated, self-enclosed world.

Suttree, however, is always surrounded by a large and intriguing cast of minor characters, ranging from the denizens of McAnally Flat, to the river family, to his own relatives, whom he visits on occasion. It is McCarthy’s great achievement that he makes these characters seem real and distinct. In this novel, he creates and populates an original world, much as did Herman Melville in Moby Dick (1851), James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), and William Faulkner in The Hamlet (1940).

Critical Context

McCarthy began work on Suttree early in his writing career, shortly after the publication of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965. Although he put it aside to write two other shorter novels—Outer Dark and Child of God—it was clearly a story which challenged him, both in scale and in complexity. He drew heavily on his knowledge of Knoxville, where he grew up and attended school. Probably no other writer, not even Knoxville’s native son James Agee, has better captured a sense of the city. Suttree’s realistic setting is in sharp contrast to the otherworldly atmospheres of his other novels, and the book reaffirms McCarthy’s enormous and varied talents.

Suttree was critically recognized as a major work upon its publication, but, like McCarthy’s other books, it was not a popular success. A densely textured novel, filled with rhetorical complexities and scenes of a disturbing and sometimes appalling nature, it was not a book to encourage easy admiration. Nevertheless, it remains a remarkable achievement, and a rewarding one for those willing to give the work the effort it deserves.

Bibliography

Aldrich, John W. “Cormac McCarthy’s Bizarre Genius: A Reclusive Master of Language and the Picaresque, on a Roll.” The Atlantic Monthly 274 (August, 1994): 89-97. Traces the evolution of McCarthy’s fiction, from the publication of Orchard Keeper in 1965 to All the Pretty Horses in 1994. Offers brief analyses of Outer Dark and Suttree.

Arnold, Edwin T. “Blood and Grace: The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy.” Commonweal 121 (November 4, 1994): 11-14. Arnold asserts that McCarthy’s novels often explore the more negative aspects of the human condition in meaningful, religiously significant ways. He discusses several of McCarthy’s works.

Arnold, Edwin T., and Diane C. Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. This collection of ten essays explores the historical and philosophical influences on McCarthy’s work, the moral center that informs his writings, and the common themes of his fiction. Includes an extensive bibliography.

Jarret, Robert J. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997. Jarret offers a detailed examination of all seven of McCarthy’s works, including Outer Dark and Suttree.