Abstract
Snyder discusses the trope of disappearance in Blood Meridian as a key aspect of McCarthy's revisionist version of the West according to (1) Paul Virilio's notion that we observe the world only as it is in the process of disappearing and (2) Jacques Derrida's notion that we always write as if under erasure, as well as the poststructural notion of language as spectral, that is, a ghostly presence that actually marks an absence. The textual analysis is focused especially on (1) the metacritical frame (narrator, glosser, and epilogue), (2) the Glanton gang as agents of disappearance, and (3) the search for the signified, both past and future, in the trace or artifact. The main argument is that everything in the novel seems to disappear.