Title: On Ethical Aberration and the Presentation of Aesthetic Ugliness in Outer Dark

Abstract: Outer Dark, one of the postmodern Southern novels by Cormac McCarthy, revisits and reinterprets the important literary motif of ethical aberration. While depicting its ugly manifestations, the novel also endows them with new implications. The abstractness of the novel’s setting and characterization, its rewriting and parody of religious archetype, and its employment of double and the trope of doubleness not only endow McCarthy’s presentation of ethical aberration with a culturally inflected uniqueness of aesthetic ugliness, but also foreground the work with the compelling appeal of a cautionary postmodern allegory and the distinctive uncanny aesthetic effect. An analysis of ethical aberration and its presentation of aesthetic ugliness in Outer Dark can be significant in helping us recognize that McCarthy’s creations not only pay homage to the tradition of Southern American literature but also develop and go beyond it.

Keywords: Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, ethical aberration, aesthetic ugliness, uncanny

Author: Xiaoping Zhang, Professor, College of International Studies, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, Jiangsu, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.02.014