See the Child: Blood Meridian and Lacan's Mirror Stage (Part I)

1.
The paternal battle underlying Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is founded in a fundamental interruption of Lacan’s Mirror Stage. Motherless and taught nothing by his father, what is presented is a struggle over the formation of the imago, a struggle rooted in violence and hallucination. Absented from the rudimentary process that allows the individual to assume an identity, the body remains fragmented, therefore thrusting the subject into a state of psychosis.

The Mirror Stage is the course by which the child, through mimicry, becomes enmeshed in the symbolic register. The developing subject is introduced to language, from which arises the chain of signifiers, and may therefore inherit a unified understanding of the body. For Lacan, the newborn is born developmentally premature, thus garnering a need to “establish a relationship between the organism and its reality.” Designated as the Innenwelt and the Umwelt, the inner and outer worlds, the child, through language, formulates an identity through a discourse between the two by means of the symbolic. The imago is contingent on this process. If the Mirror Stage is retarded, the child faces the threat of becoming alienated from the symbolic, and risks falling into psychosis. Without the mediation of the symbolic what is experienced is a “fragmentation of the body…regularly manifested in dreams,” and “the aggressive disintegration of the individual.”

The stifling of the Mirror Stage is centripetal to the developmental struggle that underlies Blood Meridian. The Kid travels in a kind of limbo. He is stuck in what Lacan describes as:

"The jubilant assumption of his specular image by this kind of being – still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence – the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject."

Because of this, The Kid is disenfranchised from the symbolic. He has not the tools to participate in an interior/exterior dialogue, and is subsequently forced into the desert of the real, becoming the main attraction in an ironic carnival of self discovery.