The Crossing

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1994

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Pages 3-64

Part 1, Pages 64-127

Part 2

Part 3, Pages 215-274

Part 3, Pages 274-332

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The End of Frontier Life

McCarthy sets the novel on a literal and metaphorical border: The Parham land is not far from Mexican territory, and their way of life similarly abuts a watershed moment in the region’s history. McCarthy marries physical and temporal setting to explore the transition from life on the American frontier to a new sense of national and geographical identity. Hidalgo County, New Mexico was established in 1920, and the Parham family arrived soon after to settle the land and begin ranching there. They are the generation at the tail end of what is considered as the Old West, the period when the Western and Southwestern states of America were first settled. The Old West is defined by tension between lawlessness and order, history and possibility. Hidalgo County is in transition toward civilization and modernity, which is apparent in many ways: The tension between the wandering Indigenous man and the Parham boys in the opening pages of the novel demonstrates a resentment toward settlement; horses and Model A trucks mingle on the road; and, symbolically, the wild wolves have been driven to extinction in the Animas Valley.

Hunters like Echols engaged in the practice of trapping and hunting for wolves in order to make the valley safe for ranchers. At the opening of the novel, Echols is long gone, suggesting that his job is finished and the frontier has become safe for humankind. When the wolf appears near the Parham land, it is an assertion of the past, and Billy’s father is described in terms reminiscent of prehistory when Billy watches him work with wolf traps: “Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be turning some older, some subtler instrument” (22). Billy, witnessing his father embody the past, takes to the old practice of wolf trapping as a way to give his transition into adulthood a sense of purpose, tying him to the old way of life. As the world changes around him, Billy still senses value in and an emotional attachment to the notion of the American frontier.

Meanwhile, the messiness of civilization asserts itself all around Billy, and when he crosses into Mexico—a place that has totemic power to him. Billy thinks of Mexico as where the wolf belongs, suggesting that it is still the wilderness that has been conquered by America. Instead, what he finds is a rich culture with its own notions of justice and towns that have vibrant communities, economic hierarchies, and an equal measure of generosity and cruelty. The wilderness Billy sought is already past, but the comfort and safety that civilization promised also turns out to be an illusion, as humanity is revealed to be inherently cruel and violent on both sides of every border. The supposed taming of the wilderness has not—and cannot—put an end to violence or economic insecurity.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the close of the novel, which marks the final death knell of frontier life: America has entered the global stage of World War II, which unified the contiguous nation in a way that hadn’t yet occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries, when much of the frontier was isolated from the larger nation. Billy’s journey ends with the Trinity nuclear test on the horizon, which causes birds to wake and tarantulas to freeze in fear (425). The future McCarthy suggests is grim: By unlocking the atom, humanity has fully disrupted the natural order, ending the period of transition between frontier life and modernity and asserting a new kind of violent dominance that threatens the whole planet. The final scene of the novel is a depiction of simultaneous personal and global apocalypse. Billy’s personal devastation is complete, the frontier he called home is now integrated into a larger national identity, and humanity’s relationship to the natural world is replaced by the final dominance of science.

Tension Between Cultures on the Borderlands

At 16, Billy Parham has a relatively simplistic and isolated view of his home in the Animas Valley, but as he enters into the adult world, he gains awareness of the tensions between Mexican, American, and Indigenous people along the New Mexico border. One of the first scenes of the novel establishes the stakes of this issue: The Indigenous man Billy and Boyd encounters makes demands of them because they’ve scared away the animals he depends on for sustenance. Billy tries to defuse the conversation by appealing to his mother’s charity, but the exchange is filled with distrust, and the Indigenous man says, “I aint coming down there to get shot” (7). Billy interprets the situation as unwarranted hostility and disrespects the man in turn, unwilling to consider the Indigenous man’s point and his perspective as a displaced person. This instance of racism exacerbates the situation and is implied to have a role in the family’s murder later in the novel—though tellingly, the reader must rely on the sheriff’s assumptions that the people who killed the Parham family were Indigenous; the novel does not comment on the certainty of this matter. This creates a pattern of Othering Indigenous—and later Mexican—people throughout the novel that diminishes as Billy matures.

Billy’s desire to return the wolf to the mountains of Mexico is a key example of Othering: He presumes that Mexico is still a wild place that has not been civilized like his own American community, and he doesn’t consider that Mexicans would have a different viewpoint from his own on the issue. Billy considers his own judgment on the matter as reason enough. This echoes the colonialist impulse of manifest destiny that drove Westward expansion and the annexation and purchase of the lands Billy lives on: The Americans who participated in manifest destiny were working on the assumption that the land was an empty landscape that could be bent to their will, ignoring millennia of history and culture and disrespecting the natural world in the process.

At the end of Billy’s first journey into Mexico, the hacendado’s son makes this cultural tension explicit when he asks Billy if he is “Pasar o traspasar?” (Passing or trespassing?, 119). Billy’s quest is revealed as an old story: one of an American imposing his will on the cultures around him without their permission. Billy learns caution from this, which is apparent when he later tries to reason with the one-armed man about the horses or when he shows more curiosity toward the culture around him, but this experience also hardens him toward Mexico and its people. Billy and his brother engage in stereotypical racist attitudes, such as when they refuse to order goat, opting instead for the more familiar, but ultimately unappetizing, enchiladas. McCarthy emphasizes their ignorance humorously when the server brings out a delicious-smelling platter of goat for other patrons.

Despite Billy and Boyd’s repeated failures to empathize across cultural lines, the compassion of Mexican people is a key feature of the novel. The community living on common land houses and cares for Billy and Boyd, and Boyd is rescued from death by workers who put themselves in danger to intervene. The doctor who treats Boyd refuses payment, and Billy develops great respect for him. Still, Billy is unable to fully accept and empathize with Mexican people; by the time he returns to find what happened to Boyd, his heart is fully hardened against Mexico, its culture, and its history. The scene in the bar in which he nearly gets shot by a veteran of the Mexican Revolution is entirely at his deliberate provocation, as if Billy is willing to die to prove that Mexico is a violent, inhumane place. His inability to see the whole of the culture is a large part of what leaves Billy bereft at the end of the novel, suggesting that McCarthy’s motif of the benefits of human connection transcends borders.

The Nature of Meaning in an Indifferent Universe

Throughout The Crossing, Billy encounters characters who try to help him by imparting some kind of philosophy to him. Often, they see him as someone who has been orphaned or is treading a dangerous path. Though many of them are able to move him for a time, the central tragedy of Billy as a character is that his disillusionment with the world is total, and the close of the novel suggests that his mental state is an accurate reflection of the state of the world, with the coming violence of the nuclear age signaling an end to religion, community, and narrative, which are the key pathways to meaning that the novel’s characters advocate for.

The caretaker of the church is one figure who tries to teach Billy the power of narrative in his long story about his relationship with a heretic. Like Billy, the heretic loses everything, and he chooses to reject God as a result. The caretaker tries and fails to bring the heretic back into the fold, but in doing so he sees two lessons. The first is that all stories are linked by the desire of humans to make meaning of their lives—“Rightly heard all tales are one” (143). The second lesson is an extrapolation of the first: “the lesson of a life can never be its own. […] It is lived for the other only” (158). This exhortation is what convinces Billy to go home to his family, only to find that his opportunity to live for others has been taken from him. Still, characters urge him to find community, and it’s Billy’s drive to stay connected with Boyd that leads him to construct a story of his own for them as outlaws.

Two later stories Billy hears echo the caretaker’s tale but carry a growing sense of nihilism in the world that must be counteracted. The first is the story of the primadonna’s opera. When Billy asks her why she is murdered in the opera each night, the listening man replies that it is because there is nothing beneath her mask. The story she tells is empty underneath, and the tragedy she experiences is meaningless. The story that the blind man tells Billy begins in a similar place—his blinding at the hands of a Huertista leaves him believing that his life is meaningless, and he longs for death. The stories he hears within his own story are what change his mind and lead him to his truth: There is great violence in the world, and great evil, but there is also community and caring. The blind man chooses the latter, and tries to convince Billy that he similarly can choose what matters and what has value in a meaningless world.

The final story Billy hears is from the leader of the nomads who have recovered the crashed airplane, and it muddies matters further. There is doubt that the nomads have the right airplane, but the nomads choose to believe that fate has chosen for them, since the first plane was destroyed. The leader of the nomads argues for a kind of optimistic nihilism: they do not know if they have the right airplane, and it does not matter, so they choose to believe that the airplane they do have is meaningful and the story itself is what gives it meaning. This echoes what Billy heard from the corridero, who argued that Billy misunderstood the meaning of a corrido when he tried to parse the facts from the myth in the song.

Billy is attracted to these beliefs, and the relief they offer from his grief, but ultimately, he can’t accept them. When he tries to tell his story to a stranger in the way so many have done for him, he sputters and says “I just got to jabberin” and tells the man a bit about Boyd instead (420). For Billy, Boyd is the one who was able to make life meaningful—he was Billy’s remaining connection to the world, and he was the one who understood the power of story. Billy cannot get past his grief, and he can only reckon with his brother’s tangible, physical remains. Because he is unable to believe in the meaning he’s been offered by other stories, he ends the novel as a new heretic and the huérfano (orphan) he was warned he would become.