Cormac McCarthy's setting in Blood Meridian is a landscape of infinite and diverse beauty. McCarthy highlights the striking beauty of the combinations of shrubby plants, jagged rocks, and the fused copper and crimson colors of the fiery wasteland that frame this nightmarish novel. Various descriptions, from the desolate to the scenic, feature McCarthy's highly crafted, lyrical prose. Such descriptions of the divine landscape seem to serve a dual function. While an isolated highlight of this gruesome novel, McCarthy's beautiful setting also serves as an intricate device to establish the novel's themes and create the reality in which it is set. Aside from the novel's thematic development, McCarthy's setting and his detailed description of the ornate beauty of the desert Southwest deserves praise. A lyrical quality and refined beauty are evident in the novel's description. McCarthy's extensive accounts of the desert's pristine beauty can be seen as an artistic and visually arresting work separate from the novel's plot. Such memorable accounts seem to be the only highlight in an incredibly disturbing book (Moran 37). By midday they had begun to climb towards the gap in the mountains. Riding among the lavender or soapwort, under the peaks of Animas. The shadow of an eagle had moved away from the line of riders below and they looked up to mark where it rode in that fragile, flawless blue void. In the evening they came to a mesa overlooking all the country to the north... The butcher paper-crumpled mountains lay in a sharp fold of shadow under the long blue twilight, and in the middle distance the enamelled bed of a dry lake lay glittering like the imbrium sea. (168)Such highly developed and...... middle of paper ......n there are no limitations of morality or law. A comparison of man's fruitless journey is described as "they move like migrants beneath a drifting star and their trail across the earth reflects in its faint arch the movements of the earth itself" (McCarthy 153). Therefore, the setting strongly influences the theme of the novel and its characters rather than being a detached element of the narrative (147). Cormac McCarthy's brilliant descriptions of the southwestern desert landscape in Blood Meridian can be seen to serve a dual purpose. In a way they are the only highlight of a novel full of gruesome realities. By analyzing the characteristics of the setting and the connections to the plot and theme of the novel, the reader can see that the setting is a vital element in the plausibility of the plot and in understanding the underlying meaning of the novel..