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"He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for
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mindless violence. "
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What McCarthy announces here, in his revision of Wordsworth,
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is that, although to invoke Milton's Satan is already to project us into
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the realm of Romantic figures,
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he is rejecting the later Romanticism of the early nineteenth century which found in humankind,
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especially in the child as the epitome of pure humankind,
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a kind of great hopefulness.
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This is not what McCarthy sees in humankind.
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This is not what the kid gives to us, even though we are told,
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a little later on, on page 4,
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the child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars,