Suttree

Suttree is a novel from McCarthy’s Southern fiction oeuvre. Influenced by McCarthy’s own life in Tennessee, Suttree exposes society’s most ostracized characters and presents them as sympathetic lost souls who have succumbed to poverty and despair. Suttree is greatly influenced by the Southern Gothic genre. Literature in this genre is set in the American South and feature elements of horror, the supernatural, mystery, and macabre incidents and tones. Characters in Southern Gothic literature are often eccentric.

Gothic literature refers to a literary movement popular in England in the 18th century, developed by authors like Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), in which elements of the supernatural like ghosts, vampires, and monsters expose critiques of society. Setting has always been crucial to the Gothic novel. Environments that are identified by shadowy darkness, rain, and foreboding mountains increase the internal tension of the characters.

American Gothic literature became popular in the 19th century, with authors like Edgar Allan Poe borrowing from the English Gothic novel, but with a focus on the monster within the individual. In American Gothic literature, it is society and the individual that are the supernatural factors. Similarly, American Gothic literature focuses on settings as environments of dread and darkness.

William Faulkner is the author most known for developing the Southern American Gothic genre. Writing in the 1920s, Faulkner captured rural and urban poverty, religious crisis, and connection to land as elements of darkness and beauty. Another marker of the Southern Gothic genre that Faulkner’s novels exemplify is dark humor, in which characters and settings are both disturbing and foolish, creating comedic relief. Faulkner’s fiction, set in a fictionalized version of his own Mississippi town, created a new modernist subgenre of American literature. Novels like The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) popularized an artistic style unique to the Southern Gothic genre.

Suttree’s prose is influenced by Faulkner. Faulkner wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style, in which a continuous flow of reactions to stimuli from internal and external sources structure the narrative. For example, McCarthy’s narrative in Suttree bounces from one sound, smell, or image to another, in seemingly unconnected order. The flow in McCarthy’s narrative isn’t direct. Instead, his use of stream-of-consciousness helps place the reader in Suttree’s shoes and replicates his perception of the world around him. The human mind does not process external and internal stimuli as a neat narrative thread, and stream-of-consciousness honors that. Suttree also has moments of dark comic relief, most prominently in the character Harrogate. Harrogate is at times an unsympathetic character, and at other times so foolish and pitiable that the reader can’t help but root for him. Harrogate lives a life that typifies The Absurdity of Modern Existence. Suttree is set in the poorer neighborhoods of Knoxville, in which dilapidated and meager housing characterizes the depression of the characters. The external world of darkness parallels the internal world of characters who experience addiction, guilt, and bitterness. McCarthy uses Southern colloquialisms and accents in the dialogue of this novel, cementing Suttree as a culturally Southern novel.