Psychic Fracture and the Limits of Reality: Existentialism, Trauma, and Phenomenology in McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris
A. S. Jothi
Natural Resources for Human Health September 22, 2026 DOI: 10.53365/nrfhh.3243 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Qualitative interdisciplinary close reading (theoretical/literary analysis) Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Key findings | Argues that The Passenger and Stella Maris mark McCarthy's turn from external violence to interiorized psychological and existential trauma, reading Bobby Western's grief and guilt and Alicia Western's schizophrenia and mathematical skepticism as a crisis of reality, identity, memory, and knowledge. Contends that the siblings' shared grief turns memory into a volatile, generative space and that the inherited Manhattan Project legacy is interiorized as psychic dread, with the novels locating meaning in the encounter with uncertainty. |
Abstract
Cormac McCarthy’s companion novels, The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris (2022), represent a profound late-career turn from externalized physical violence to interiorized psychological, existential, and phenomenological trauma. Through a qualitative, interdisciplinary close reading informed by Sartre and Camus’s existentialism, Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra’s trauma theory, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, this study analyzes how Bobby Western and Alicia Western’s psychological fractures operate not merely as clinical psychopathology, but as a fundamental crisis of reality, identity, memory, and epistemological certainty. Bobby’s grieving, paralyzing guilt, and self-imposed isolation embody the latent, repetitive temporality of trauma, while Alicia’s schizophrenia, hallucinatory encounters (notably the Thalidomide Kid), and mathematical skepticism interrogate the validity of human perception and secular epistemology. The Western siblings' shared grief and emotional entanglement transform memory from an archival record into a volatile, generative space of shared suffering. By examining how the inherited legacy of the Manhattan Project interiorizes technological violence into psychic dread, the study demonstrates that McCarthy positions human consciousness at the precipice of the unknowable. Ultimately, The Passenger and Stella Maris assert that while reality remains incomplete, unstable, and impervious to absolute closure, the human struggle for meaning endures precisely within the encounter with existential uncertainty.
Comparable studies
Other qualitative studies on philosophy of mind, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qualitative thematic analysis of the phenomenology of near-death experiences Cardiac arrest survivors | 2018 | Qualitative study | n = 34 |
| Phenomenology and Sequelae of 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine Use Psychiatrists who had taken MDMA | 1992 | Qualitative study | n = 20 |
| A phenomenology of meditation-induced light experiences: traditional buddhist and neurobiological perspectives American Buddhist practitioners | 2014 | Qualitative study | |
| Evoking the ineffable: The phenomenology of extreme sports. Extreme sports participants across three continents, including BASE jumping, big wave... | 2017 | Qualitative study | n = 15 |
| Phenomenology and content of the inhaled N, N-dimethyltryptamine (N, N-DMT) experience. Naturalistic inhaled N,N-DMT experiences posted to the r/DMT Reddit community | 2022 | Qualitative analysis | n = 3,778 |