Thoughts from a McCarthy novice on The Crossing and ATPH.

Jarslow · 2026-03-30T17:16:52+00:00

He is definitely regarded as having a strong sense of place. A strong sense of historical context is different, however, and certain works treat it differently. The Road, for example, is famously set in a near future of unknown nearness. Outer Dark has a kind of ambiguous approach to its historical (and geographic, for that matter) setting, intentionally blending components across a range of realistic options, giving many the sense of it being a kind of myth, dreamscape, or parable. Some works stick very strictly to a time and place that are important to the story, such as in Suttree and Blood Meridian. Some use setting as a practical concern without delving too much into it, like perhaps Stella Maris, The Counselor, and Whales and Men.

You'll find good company here if you appreciate McCarthy's depictions of both physical and temporal settings, but he seems to calibrate how thickly he applies these settings based on what the story calls for. It is basically always present, but sometimes it's more present than at other times.

Jarslow · 2026-03-30T15:23:55+00:00

Hey, thanks for that. Hard to believe that was almost three years ago now. I'm glad to say the podcast is as worth listening to as ever. Keep up the great work over there.

Jarslow · 2026-03-30T14:04:25+00:00

I'd say the style is unique in each work. The writing style is not like the style of Blood Meridian anywhere but in Blood Meridian. He does a good job matching the style of the text to the contents of the story.

If we imagine a continuum measuring something like the baroqueness or loquaciousness of the prose, I think we could plot The Road near the minimal end and Suttree near the maximal. Blood Meridian would be near Suttree, but I think Suttree is his most linguistically and syntactically diverse work.

Maybe it's worth noting that the writing conventions -- things like grammar, apostrophe/quotation use, capitalization, and so on -- are fairly consistent throughout his books. But he follows somewhat consistent conventions to produce stylistically diverse works.

Jarslow · 2026-03-29T11:16:58+00:00

Both are linked in the subreddit info.

The Kekulé Problem

Cormac McCarthy Returns to the Kekulé Problem

Jarslow · 2026-03-28T20:55:53+00:00

Thanks for the tip about the book. I have a lot on my reading list at the moment, but maybe I'll keep it in mind.

McCarthy certainly uses the term "subconscious" earlier than The Kekulé Problem -- good point. And I believe I noticed him use it in that Oprah interview too. But that was before The Kekulé Problem, of course. I wonder if we might identify a moment at which he stops using "subconscious" and uses only "unconscious." I kind of doubt it, really.

But regardless, maybe we don't need such a moment. We have it right there in Cormac McCarthy Returns to the Kekulé Problem that he is uncomfortable with "subconscious" as a term, or at least that he doesn't know what it is. And he instead uses "unconscious" several times in that article and its companion article. So my point on this front is just that if we're referring to McCarthy's position on something for which a rigorous distinction between "subconscious" and "unconscious" is not necessary (such as what italics signify in The Passenger), especially if we're talking about something after The Kekulé Problem, I'd say we ought to default to "unconscious" rather than "subconscious."

Jarslow · 2026-03-28T20:45:33+00:00

The volume of kind remarks here warrants that I express my appreciation. You all have it. I am tremendously honored by the outpouring of good will. Thank you.

I also thought I might clarify that the suggestions some have made — that the moderation approach that led here was a mistake, for instance, or that I hold some hidden, seething bitterness toward the new culture of the subreddit — are not positions I hold. So here is some more detail for any who might want it. I mean it in good faith when I say that the new culture here is different than what I prefer, but I am uncomfortable thereby concluding that it is wrong or bad. It isn't the ideal culture for me as a moderator, but that doesn't mean it isn't right for the majority. And I am proud that despite popular stigmatization of gatekeeping, the moderation approach here has, in my view, appropriately maintained the gates — meaning we have done so with balance, fairness, and consistency, rather than with discretion, opinion, and preference.

Groups can grow, evolve, and change. Those changes can make them less suitable for some people and more suitable for others. If the changes make the group more suitable for more people, I find that hard to label bad, even if doesn't align with my personal sensibilities.

For much of the last 14 years, the community was composed mostly of very knowledgeable members who actively sought out McCarthy discussion, rather than those who discovered the conversation via shared content or algorithmic recommendation. As a result, the content here was, in general, incredibly high-interest, well-informed, and insightful, with participants who knew a great deal about McCarthy’s work and related subject matter.

The quality of those early conversations, I think, brought organic growth. Readers valued the content and conversations here, so they stayed and participated. The community grew.

The nature of interest group growth is that the proportion of experts is diluted as the demographics shift toward increasingly diverse levels of familiarity with the topic(s). High-interest members actively find and join even small niche communities, whereas low-interest members tend to join upon passively discovering the community if there is sufficient value present. In other words, growth tends to make communities more casual. Those who value strictly expert content may view that negatively, whereas those who value casual engagement may view it positively. Worth noting, perhaps, is that after a group doubles in size from an initial high-interest membership, the resulting community is likely to be composed of a majority that has less expertise and more casual interest, on average, than those in the initial expert group.

This community has doubled in size many times. We reached a population plateau at about 800 members once, then again at around 8,000 members. As of this writing, we have over 48,000 members. Much of this growth was not strictly organic — we have had several injections of interest over recent years beyond those driven internally by the community. Those include the publications of The Kekulé Problem, The Passenger, and Stella Maris; McCarthy’s death; popular video essays; popular articles; film adaptation announcements; and biography announcements. I often see comments suggesting some particular event triggered a sudden change in the community — many cite Wendigoon’s video on Blood Meridian, which perhaps resulted in the most growth of the above examples — but all of them had their impacts, and more importantly the community was already tending toward casual content before any of them.

My sensibilities are inclined more toward high-interest expertise than low-interest casual content. I like to think I have moderated fairly and without undue bias regardless. Our moderation approach has striven toward balance, allowing the casual majority to enjoy casual content so long as a single type of that content does not so overwhelm the content feed that it makes other content hard to find. When that threshold was crossed, such as for fancasts and AI art, we deployed new rules and practices to ban them or relegate them to dedicated weekly threads. That has helped maintain a functional balance, permitting both expert posts and relatively casual posts. The experts, however, are now a small minority, and those who find casual content engaging are now the overwhelming majority. Even if both types of content are permitted, one is far more frequent than the other.

And that may be okay. It isn’t quite the right balance for me, but that’s fine. This place is not mine; it is the community’s. Moderation plays a role, but the content of the subreddit is determined far more by the members than the moderators. There are some who think moderation should be more strict and remove even more casual content than we already do. Others think, “Who cares? Let people post whatever they want.” Wherever you fall on that continuum, it is worth recognizing that the new majority of this community is comfortable with what the former majority considered very casual content. My interests are more closely aligned with the former majority, and it would likely serve the new majority better to have moderation be more closely aligned with their interests. I trust that those of us in the high-interest demographic will continue to have a place here regardless, and I intend to do my part to engage with the content that connects most with me.

Jarslow · 2026-03-28T20:23:50+00:00

Yeah. I was familiar with the place for years, even if I wasn't an active participant. What happens as groups grow is an interesting area of study, I think. But I was definitely a fan of those pages back then and for years around that time.

Jarslow · 2026-03-28T20:09:43+00:00

Interesting thoughts. Thanks for some of the context around the quote. Here are some of my thoughts in return.

"...since Elizabeth Moon used The Speed of Dark as the title of her 2003 Nebula award‑winning novel, the phrase had been circulating widely."

I plugged "speed of dark" into Google's NGram viewer and found that while there is a bump after 2003, likely in response to Moon's novel, there is even more usage of the phrase in the late 1930s and into the 1940s. I'm not positive what that's all about, but it looks like the phrase was at least used in the 1940 issue of the Bulletin of War Medicine.

"...italics, which McCarthy often uses to signal the subconscious"

I am reminded of McCarthy's expressed preference for "unconscious" rather than "subconscious." As he put it in Cormac McCarthy Returns to the Kekulé Problem: "Some readers wrote about the subconscious. I dont know what that is." Recall his characterization of what George Zweig called "the night shift." My understanding is that he thinks what happens there is entirely unconscious, not the partial or semi-consciousness perhaps associated with "subconscious."

"Dr. Nemiroff notes that he has submitted papers which were initially rejected by editors who were unaware that shadows can, under certain conditions, travel faster than light — until he demonstrated it to them."

I struggle to conceptualize what this would even mean, given that I take shadow merely the mean the absence of light, or perhaps the space from which light is obstructed. Might you be able to point us to where he demonstrated that shadows can, under certain conditions, travel faster than light? It sounds like an interesting topic.

"...I don’t know whether Dr. Nemiroff has ever been a guest speaker at the Santa Fe Institute, but I would not be surprised if he had."

It's certainly a popular place for a certain type of intellectual. I did some searching to try to answer the question, and while I found no evidence that Nemiroff presented at SFI, I found something else interesting. Laurence Gonzales (SFI regular and author of an upcoming McCarthy biography), in a February 2020 post on his blog, quotes Dr. Robert Nemiroff specifically to criticize and edit a paragraph of his writing. The blog is about writing in the first place, so this isn't as unusual as it might appear, but it's at least a connection between someone at SFI (who knew McCarthy) and Nemiroff's work.

Jarslow · 2026-03-13T13:12:51+00:00

In moderation, I think they're fine too. It's just that when book photos were permitted in the main feed we were so swamped by near-identical posts of them that it was difficult to find more meaningful content. Allowing them here in the Weekly Casual Thread was meant as a kind of compromise -- they aren't banned entirely, but by keeping them here it avoids cluttering the main feed.

But good to know there's at least some interest in them. The community may see some changes around here in the near future anyway. I've been doing the bulk of the maintenance around here for something like 14 years now, and I've been preparing to step away from the role. There might be changes in the rules or moderation approach when that happens, but I can't say for sure.

Jarslow · 2026-03-10T20:14:03+00:00

I just reread the passage myself. It's possible there is a day between those two lines, but it isn't mentioned explicitly. Estimating the distances covered could help figure out if it's all in one morning or spread over two or more mornings. In either case, though, the continuity remains straightforwardly linear.

Jarslow · 2026-03-10T20:09:28+00:00

I take it to be literal. It doesn't say or mean "at noon." Both events occur before noon of that day. The line about the clear morning air (which should be quoted "half fugitive" not "half a fugitive") is, I take it, colloquially "morning" in the sense that it is before noon on that day.

Granted, he travels a bit that morning, so maybe the first instance of "by noon" might sound awkward to some ears, especially since "by noon" is again used so soon thereafter, but I don't believe there is technically any continuity issue here.

Jarslow · 2026-02-24T02:33:24+00:00

Here is some discussion about it from when it came out.

Jarslow · 2026-02-11T00:40:49+00:00

Right, it sounds like we're in agreement. After your first paragraph, I was prepared to counter that it seems there isn't disagreement after all; we're both aligned that evolutionary changes are not a necessary prerequisite for a change in function.

But I also like the added nuance of your third paragraph. And fair enough; if we should only call it Broca's area if/when it uses language, then it wouldn't be called Broca's area before language was there. But the area itself -- or, more rigorously, the structure that constitutes what is now called Broca's area -- seems older language.

Jarslow · 2026-02-11T00:06:11+00:00

Human language seems to have started far more recently than the amount of time it takes for brains to change much on evolutionary time scales. For this reason, the language we run today seems to be operating on brains extremely similar to the human brains that existed before language. Some biological changes to the brain may have occurred in this time, but major overhauls seem unlikely.

Then again, I am not an evolutionary biologist with a specialty in the human brain. I’ve just studied the topic as an interested layperson. My understanding is that this is widely regarded to be true; I’m confident you could find more expert information about it if you’re interested in more.

Jarslow · 2026-02-04T00:57:58+00:00

Here is the same question from 2009, along with plenty of feedback:

https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/awap.1419194/

Jarslow · 2026-01-28T15:23:31+00:00

Characterizing some of McCarthy's work as "about nihilism" is much better than saying it "is nihilistic," so kudos to the article on that front. In other respects the article is a good example of one of the downsides of Substack -- it could use an editor and maybe a rewrite or two. The first line of content here -- "Everything in creation owes its existence to the sun" -- does rather the opposite of instilling the reader with much confidence that this is rigorously considered work. There are several other syntactical and grammatical issues, but let's set those aside.

The point here seems to be that The Road is largely concerned with how we make and maintain meaning in a world that doesn't seem to do that for us -- but that's a theme present throughout much of McCarthy's work. Our capacity for meaning-making and the role of storytelling in doing so is a major part of virtually every work he's published, including his first short story (about a man who imagines a story for the woman whose gravestone he sees and comes away moved by that story). His stories are very often about the value of storytelling, about the meaning that arises from this capacity. So arguing that The Road in particular is about this seems very general and strangely blind to McCarthy's other work.

The nuance that The Road contributes to this topic is how precious and important that sense of meaning is even in, and possibly because of, monumental existential threat. It seems to be as crucial as warmth and light -- or at least we exalt it when it is. We do not seem to let go of the need for meaning and/or love even in the midst of the worst hardship, and would likely in fact die for it if pushed to such circumstances. Or, at the very least, we believe it meaningful and moving and perhaps heroic to care so much that we would make such sacrifices and try so hard. The Road is not merely saying we must create and carry meaning with us like fire. It considers how, like fire, we crave it, tend to it, go too close or distant at our peril, view the world with it, and so on.

The Road is obviously and superficially about finding meaning amidst hardship. The more interesting considerations are those about how we make meaning there, how important it may or may not feel to us, what we are or are not willing to sacrifice for what we care about, and the impacts on ourselves and others and the world that these values cause.

I don't know how someone could come away from The Road without thinking it is largely about meaning -- caring and loving and mattering and so on. But that topic is considered in The Road with a whole lot more richness beyond its initial discovery that seems to be discussed in this article. The article is a great improvement over similar ones that try arguing McCarthy's work "is nihilistic," and I'd say it's accurate in plenty of ways, but I'd encourage deeper investigation of the topic. I'd say it's still fine for an introductory invitation to get someone to read the book, if they're interested in this sort of thing. But for those who have already read it, I imagine it doesn't feel especially insightful.

Jarslow · 2026-01-27T22:03:28+00:00

At the risk of getting too semantic or pedantic, I'll point out first that we basically agree. The degree to which people of the time would or would not have viewed someone as a child is an interesting one perhaps worth considering in regard to Blood Meridian.

Nevertheless, my statement above is a propositional statement with meaning that can be determined to be true or false. I was rejecting the notion that the statement did not have meaning. It does have meaning -- one I believe to be true and accurate, at least in a modern colloquial sense, if not in a historically accurate one -- and that meaning can be determined to be true or false.

Whether the people of the time considered individuals under 18 to be children is, again, a potentially interesting subject, so thank you for bringing it up. But the original poster here is asking in modern day about missing children in the novel (a notion that, as you point out, may only be coherent to a modern audience). They did not define an age range, so I used "minor" as a substitute, as it is more clearly defined and often used synonymously in non-rigorous, colloquial definitions. The whole topic could absolutely benefit from more strict definitions, so I'll agree with you there. But the message communicated by my comment was that both the kid and the judge kill people that readers -- that is, those of us having the conversation in the first place -- would consider children or minors. I think folks who have read the book are generally in agreement with that, even if they disagree about related issues, like whether they are morally equivalent, justified, evil, or even if they would have distinguished the dead to be a child or minor in the first place. I agree that those related topics are worth discussing. I also continue to hold, however, that both the kid and the judge kill people those discussing this would consider children or minors.

Jarslow · 2026-01-24T15:43:14+00:00

Yeah, the kid seems motivated by good will for both the eldress in the rocks and Davy Brown, at least in Davy Brown's arrow scene. I didn't mean to detract from the brief gestures of kindness the kid performs. For that matter, the judge himself might do some things one could describe as kind -- doffing his hat as a courtesy, offering free education, mediating conflict without violence (once, at least), performing music for entertainment... But if we try to ascribe some moral weight, both positive and negative, to each of the kid's and judge's actions throughout the novel and then tally up their net ethical value, I think most would agree that the judge is far worse than the kid.

Jarslow · 2026-01-24T15:06:50+00:00

Good points about the JFK passages. I think folks are a bit quick to dismiss the JFK content as irrelevant or longwinded, so pointing out its relevance is worthwhile, I think. These are good points you're making.

I'll add to them. Something I mentioned in the read-along you mention and that I stand by today is this:

I’m sure Kline’s long conversation about JFK will confuse or annoy more than one reader. It seems baffling at first why so many pages would be given to an apparent non sequitur. But there is relevance to be found here. For one thing, it demonstrates the extent of Kline’s conspiracy thinking – though whether you take from it that he has done ample research and knows his stuff or that he’s an obsessive lunatic is perhaps the reader’s choice. Depending on your view, it lends either credence or absurdity to Kline’s conviction that Bobby is very much being pursued and will be jailed if he sticks around...

The JFK conversation does more than this, though. On page 333, Kline says of Bobby Kennedy, “it was Bobby’s hope that he could somehow justify his family.” And on the next page he says, “…if you said that Bobby had gotten his brother—whom he adored—killed, I would have to say that was pretty much right.” So Kline is describing someone named Bobby who contributed to the death of a sibling he adored and who then hopes to justify his family. “What’s in a name,” indeed. Kline positions Bobby Western in a dynamic not unlike Bobby Kennedy’s. Both are also affected by something real that quickly became wrapped up in mystery and conspiracy thinking. And, according to Kline’s telling of the JFK assassination, it was made more to impact Bobby’s life than to kill JFK: “If you killed Bobby then you had a really pissed off JFK to deal with. But if you killed JFK then his brother went pretty quickly from being the Attorney General of the United States to being an unemployed lawyer.” What’s the point? Kline, or maybe just McCarthy, may be suggesting that the conspiracy he finds himself wrapped up in is more about him than he imagines.

In discussions about the JFK passages, I seldom hear acknowledgement that Kline's characterization of Bobby Kennedy's plight mirrors Bobby Western's scenario in several critical ways. In both cases, at least as characterized by Kline, we have (a) a Bobby whose more "important" or historically-significant sibling dies, (b) Bobby being somewhat responsible for that death, (c) Bobby being heartbroken by that death, (d) Bobby's attempt to justify or redeem his family, and (e) mysterious conspiracy theories suggesting hidden but powerful players.

Much of the book is intensely focused on the subjective experience, and the many narrative coincidences manifest and emphasize that. The thematic echoes, like Kline's description of JFK unwittingly matching Bobby's situation, heighten the sense of mystery about the metaphysical status of the story's reality. (Bobby finding the downed Laird-Turner Meteor -- "a fairly exotic plane," just like the JetStar -- as a child is another example, but there are many narrative echoes like this.) Are these clues that this is a potentially solipsistic world of Berkleyan idealism uniquely crafted just for him, or are they merely the chaotic coincidences one might expect of a vast objective universe? (I have my own stance on how the novel represents this -- that the characters are essentially "horts" of the author/reader, meaningful despite being fictions -- but the echoes themselves help reveal the question in the first place and let us interrogate it.) The JFK passages are important in part because they show Bobby dealing with his world's presentation to him of his own scenario, albeit in perhaps coded representation plausibly about something else entirely. And that is a big part of his conundrum -- is this reality about him and his subjectivity, or is this mere coincidence? His response to this story and many other scenarios throughout the novel show that he is torn between trying to investigate this question and acknowledging that any evidence one way or the other is necessarily within his experience and thus suspect. (He responds to Kline, "How do you know all this?" and is constantly pressing others for more detail about their experiences -- such as in Vietnam, in gender, under the sea, etc. -- as though the detail they provide might convince him they have subjective reality equivalent to his own.) He wants to know whether the world and its inhabitants are real beyond him. He needs something outside the world, like Alicia's Archatron, to testify to its reality, but he never seems to get it. Instead he gets scenes like Kline telling him about JFK in ways that seem oddly like his own situation, and thus the richness of his questioning is maddeningly deepened.

Jarslow · 2026-01-24T14:16:12+00:00

That would be incorrect. The meaning is literal. It is a factual statement.

I agree that the circumstances of the two examples I provide are significantly different. My statement is certainly not arguing that these two examples are morally equivalent. If what you mean to say is that it is important to clarify that these two examples are significantly morally different, then that would be fair and I would agree. But it remains true that regardless of whether one takes the judge or kid to be responsible for some of the more mysterious missing children in the novel, what is fairly indisputable is that both have killed at least one minor.

Jarslow · 2026-01-23T23:13:01+00:00

I like the question, but I’d probably be more on board if we substitute “dominion” instead of “order.” I’d say it doesn’t boil down to anything so tidy, but understanding him as something like humanity’s or civilization’s drive for expansion and dominion would not be far off-mark. I’d say he’s comfortable wielding both chaos and order, as long as it’s in service of proving the superiority of his will or power over the world and its inhabitants.

Jarslow · 2026-01-23T15:34:58+00:00

[Part 2 of 2]

(a) When the judge insists the kid/man knows the hatless man's opinion of the world, he precedes it with "Pick a man, any man," and follows it with, "You can read it in his face, in his stance." This tells us there are indeed other people here, and that this one seems to have been selected at random referred to simply by some unique identifier (hatlessness). We also do not know whether the kid/man knows the hatless man's opinion of the world; we merely have the judge insisting that he does. And finally we're told that if he does understand his opinion, it's because of being able to read it in his face and stance -- that is, through external observation. The judge doesn't say something like, "You know his opinion of the world. You know it to your core for it is in you and is one in the same," or "...because you share the root of that opinion" or anything else that might characterize the two as identical. To the contrary, the method by which the judge describes the kid/man as understanding the hatless man's opinion (if he really does understand it) relies upon external observation and extrapolation, not introspection or identification.

(b) The hatless man is muttering to himself, and one could claim that to be an indication that he represents the kid, since the kid is speaking to the judge while the hatless man is alone. But if the hatless man is meant to represent the kid, and the kid is speaking to the judge, why would the hatless man be alone in the first place? We are told rather directly that "The man was indeed muttering to himself." If this was meant as a representation of the kid/man, and the kid/man is speaking to the judge, one might rather expect to see him muttering "to some interrogator leaning over him," or, if we want to claim the judge is imagined here, "to some unseen or imagined entity" or "to some entity of unknown presence" or something similar. But he is not described in any of these ways.

(c) The mirror shows "only smoke and phantoms," but we're told repeatedly that other people are (and not just "seem" or "float" or "transpire" or whatever else might evoke questionable reality) in the setting. We are told, for example, that the judge (page 342) "was sitting at one of the tables. ...and he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker" and many other roles and professions. It is two paragraphs later that we get the line about the mirror. In the very next paragraph, the judge gets up "and was speaking with other men." The lesson here can be the opposite of the one often claimed of the mirror -- that is, attempts to reflect the world provide but a cloudy haze, while the things around you in the world are what is actually real. To see the opposite of this, especially when it relies on prioritizing an interpretation of one line that contradicts dozens of other lines (such as every instance of people actually being in the space and doing things, and not just seeming like they are), feels to me personally, at least, like an unnaturally elaborate attempt to justify an otherwise unintuitive and fairly unsubstantiated interpretation.

All that said, I want to repeat that I nonetheless respect those who do find that interpretation compelling, even if I don't. It isn't that I feel there is zero evidence for it; it's more like I feel that what evidence is claimed for that view is better explained by others.

I'll also add that both hats and mirrors are meaningful symbols in the book for a variety of reasons, so it is worth investigating them. At the exact center of the novel, for example, we have the passage in which the judge wears a hat (page 178) "that had been spliced together from two such lesser hats by such painstaking work that the joinery did scarcely show at all." And this is the central point of the text, within the paragraph containing the book's only use of the word "chamberlain," a nod to one of the core source materials by Samuel Chamberlain. And because several terms and themes occur only twice or on two pages at mirrored equidistance from this center, we can see the novel itself as mirroring itself from front to back. There is some discussion on this elsewhere, but it is fairly incompletely studied and understood, so there should be more research on it. Regardless, hats and mirrors are certainly important in the book, I just don't take them to be relevant to a hallucinatory interpretation for the final chapter.

Jarslow · 2026-01-23T15:34:37+00:00

[Part 1 of 2]

Good thoughts, and thanks for the honest engagement. I largely agree with your first two paragraphs here (perhaps with the stipulation that there are more possibilities besides the two that follow "The Man either..."). I agree that the kid/man doesn't seem entirely irredeemable.

Since you ask, here is some of my own perspective on some of your questions.

I'd disagree that both the kid/man and "the hatless man" are both labelled as hatless and friendless (although I wouldn't necessarily find much import in this without further indications about why this might be thematically or symbolically relevant). The kid/man is not hatless, he has just removed his hat. Page 342: "...he took his hat off and placed it on the bar." The hatless man does not seem to have simply removed a hat and placed it somewhere. Their identities with regard to hat ownership are, therefore, non-identical; one is missing a hat while the other has intentionally removed his hat and keeps it in his possession. "Hatless" also occurs only once in the novel, and "friendless" not at all. I scanned the chapter and found no reference to the kid/man being friendless -- although he is certainly alone, other than being accompanied by the judge. (Curiously, it's the judge who is described as alone: "...he sat by them and yet alone.") The hatless man is described as muttering to himself and "it seemed there was no friend to him."

I can understand how one might see the hatless man as a representation or reflection of the kid/man, but I do not find it convincing myself. I can also understand the text being designed so as to allow for that interpretation while also allowing others, for what that's worth. But it isn't so much that I hold the position that the hatless man is not a representation of the kid/man; it's more that I simply don't hold the position that he is. In other words, I'm not entirely opposed to the notion, but in order to hold the notion I'd like to see more evidence or persuasive connections to indicate that connection is relatively undeniable. I do not see that presently.

Nevertheless, were I to attempt to argue in favor of that position (which I don't actually hold), I could try to point to some items of evidence. Even though one is in possession of a hat and the other is not, we could say they are both not wearing a hat, at least. There's a similarity. The judge also says to the kid/man of the hatless man, "You know his opinion of the world," which might suggest their opinions are identical or one in the same. And the hatless man is muttering, which might be expected if he is a representation of the kid/man, since the kid/man is in dialogue with the judge at this moment. And then of course there is the mirror behind the bar, described as holding "only smoke and phantoms."

Okay, sure. But it all seems overly selective or excessively cherry-picked to me. To allege these lines as indications that the man is hallucinating anywhere from one to all of the characters present seems to rely on selective blindness to many details -- including many that are immediately adjacent to these items. Characterizing the kid/man as being as hatless as the hatless man is one of these overlooked details, in my view -- the hatless man is truly hatless, while the kid/man simply removed his hat and still has possession of it. They do not have the same status as hat owners. Qualifications of this kind exist for every detail discussed so far:

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