With the 1965 publication of his first novel The Orchard Keeper , Cormac McCarthy began to build the foundation for what would gradually become a style and tone that has proven inimitable, challenging, and wholly original, a body of work that was not widely and critically recognized until 1992 with the publication of All The Pretty Horses . His is one of the most respected oeuvres in 20th century American fiction, often cited by a covey of authors, mainly Postmodernists and Postmodernist scholars, as one of the greatest living American novelists. In addition to his ten novels he has written two screenplays and two plays, and, as reported in 2009 by The Guardian when the McCarthy papers were just made public at Texas State University, San-Marcos, has a novel forthcoming with a working title of The Passenger, fragments of which have been available at the Wittliff collection, in San Marcos. McCarthy has also said he has two more novels in progress. He is also active in other intellectual circles, such as the Sante Fe Institute (SFI), where he is a research colleague and “thought of in complementary terms” and whom he thanked in a prefatory note at the beginning of No Country For Old Men (2005). The science magazine Nautilus recently published a nonfiction essay by McCarthy on the origin of language and the unconscious, views which he has honed after decades of writing fiction. His supposed asceticism, apparent disregard for the literary establishment and contemporary literature, his obstinately private nature blend to lend him the status of a somewhat alienated artist. Which, he suggested in his 1992 interview with the New York Times , has helped him do the work he feels he set out to do. And certainly the casual observer would have to be keen on what he has to say. His work is often thought of as sui generis. A disdain for certain formal cinctures such as the apostrophe and the lack of attribution suggests a certain status acknowledgement with regards to the mechanics of his publishing process. The thematic integrity binding his novels, written over four decades and ostensibly unfinished, are remarkably consistent; they form a complete superstructure whose philosophy has not abrogated itself for the want of a clearer, perhaps more moralistic vision. Yet nobody has known the biographical penetralia that lies undisclosed inside his body of work, making a historicism perspective difficult. McCarthy is perhaps his own purposeful obscurant, which has resulted in a healthier and deeper pool of interpretation. The McCarthy aficionado is left to the old photographs on the dust jackets of his first novels and the few scant narrative biography blurbs at the beginnings of works of criticism, and also his recent essay on the unconscious that I’ve read to be a strange manifesto driving directly at his fourth novel, Suttree . Suttree has been his only eponymously titled work. It is also his only work set in the Knoxville environs and the only work whose linear structure is distinguished seasonally, with the chief protagonist living around the same place throughout the novel, which is relevant because most McCarthian creations are overwhelmingly peripatetic. The casual reader and the amateur critic may easily argue Suttree is McCarthy’s only “surrogate” novel. Given the paucity of biographical data on McCarthy it is this work that many critics and readers have created entire thought schemas for; in order to get closer to the life of the novelist, the thinking goes, one must enter sedulously the world he created with, to a certain degree, an imagined self starring as protagonist. Suttree bears small likenesses to McCarthy’s early life, but perhaps only in Heidgerrian ontic sense. Only when the protagonist Suttree is imbued with life does the narrative become ontological , and therefore existential. I argue that primarily through the visual or imagistic narrative of the novel meaning is developed if the reader sees Suttree’s predicament. In doing so, the reader can glean the novel’s fundamental message, which is that Suttree escapes death because he heeded the advice of his unconscious. A deeper part of us, by extension, is responsible for our fate.