While McCarthy studies have emphasized elements of the sacred in his writing, this thesis adds a new historical perspective and synthesis to reading paradigms of Cormac McCarthy. The Crossing combines the patterns of the ancient pre-Hebraic genre of the desert sublime with the basic formula of the American Western genre to interrogate McCarthy's question of whether in the postmodern moment one can still divest oneself in the desert and find access to the sublime. In an era of an invisible or absent God where post-humanist thought erases the anthropocentric supremacy of human over animal and the earth itself, the one constant in the desert sublime genre is the physical reality of the desert itself. Thus, McCarthy's recourse is to infuse the desert sublime with contemporary ecological thought. In the desert Billy Parham encounters other desert dwellers who share with him shards and traces of belief while Billy also learns bodily from the material experience of his physical sojourn. Billy is a nascent postmodern saint whose journeys into the desert reveal to him the ecotheological principle of the interconnectedness of all things as a natural physical law that undergirds the spiritual truth guiding ethical behavior. Billy arrives at a point of radical transformation that teaches him the necessity of choosing compassion, affiliation, simple service, and humility in a world of interconnected beings and living forms.

<p>This work attempts an answer to two questions. Firstly, is it possible to experience meaning when everything is transient? And secondly, in what way is objectivity possible when it comes to such phenomena as existential meaning? The questions originate from our insideperspective, and it is from what we have experienced ourselves that we try to make intelligible existential meaning. We are to a great extent part of the context in which we live. Our ability to contemplate our situation and our own contemplation is taking place in interplay with others. To make room for the small things meaningful in life, the expression existential meaning is used. In this expression both the meaningless and the meaningful are included, since both are needed for our understanding of meaning. Without the Other and that which is different, the individual person’s formation of existential meaning becomes just more of the same, it becomes an enclosure in the present. The encounter with the Other makes room for that which is different to break through.</p><p>Objectivity is possible when it comes to existential meaning, if one views objectivity as a process between people. It is performed in conversation. Those who converse, refer to their bodily experiences of the Time that remains and help each other, using language as the tool, to formulate their experiences. They compare each others’ manifestations of existential meaning,</p><p>and with the help of language they go further in the formation of what is meaningless and meaningful. Their conversations imply a normative presupposition that they can justify the claims that they make. Because it is actually not possible to make intelligible existential meaning in words other than by doing it as a mix of descriptions of that which is manifesting itself and linguistic rewritings in the form of stories. This expression of objectivity has a normative aspect, namely in relation to the possibility that we can be wrong. Therefore, we need each other in the act of judging, and together we are guided by the fact that it later on can emerge things that show that our judgment has not been fully correct. </p>

This work attempts an answer to two questions. Firstly, is it possible to experience meaning when everything is transient? And secondly, in what way is objectivity possible when it comes to such phenomena as existential meaning? The questions originate from our insideperspective, and it is from what we have experienced ourselves that we try to make intelligible existential meaning. We are to a great extent part of the context in which we live. Our ability to contemplate our situation and our own contemplation is taking place in interplay with others. To make room for the small things meaningful in life, the expression existential meaning is used. In this expression both the meaningless and the meaningful are included, since both are needed for our understanding of meaning. Without the Other and that which is different, the individual person’s formation of existential meaning becomes just more of the same, it becomes an enclosure in the present. The encounter with the Other makes room for that which is different to break through. Objectivity is possible when it comes to existential meaning, if one views objectivity as a process between people. It is performed in conversation. Those who converse, refer to their bodily experiences of the Time that remains and help each other, using language as the tool, to formulate their experiences. They compare each others’ manifestations of existential meaning, and with the help of language they go further in the formation of what is meaningless and meaningful. Their conversations imply a normative presupposition that they can justify the claims that they make. Because it is actually not possible to make intelligible existential meaning in words other than by doing it as a mix of descriptions of that which is manifesting itself and linguistic rewritings in the form of stories. This expression of objectivity has a normative aspect, namely in relation to the possibility that we can be wrong. Therefore, we need each other in the act of judging, and together we are guided by the fact that it later on can emerge things that show that our judgment has not been fully correct.