“Nothing’s Forever”: Destruction, Creation, Connection, and Miltonic Influence in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris

The article proposes that engagement with John Milton's Paradise Lost in Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger and Stella Maris furnishes a clue to comprehending the duology. These twin volumes present an extraordinary brother and sister, Bobby and Alicia Western, as a new Adam and Eve in a vitiated world. The narrative suggests that the Western siblings' unconsummated love and the underlying theme of the absent child they never had make their circumstances a dark variation upon the Edenic story. McCarthy countervails his well-documented distrust of language by reinvigorating Milton's haptic motif of Adam and Eve's handclasp and offering an alternative form of human connection, lying beyond language, in interpersonal acts of care. McCarthy's duology instructs his readers by negative example to be thankful for life's most precious gifts by revering nature, loving another, nurturing a child, and showing kindness to those other passengers who travel with us in our shared lives.