Cormac McCarthy's fiction shows that the US and Others are not sealed off hermetically from each other but have a variety of complex relations with each other. Utilizing multiple perspectives, McCarthy examines alternatives to the "racist, nationalist, or ethnically absolutist discourses" that insist upon divisions, lines of demarcation, and oppositional structures as the way to define identity, nationalism and American-ness. In particular, McCarthy's fiction makes it clear that it is necessary

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... to appreciate the things that potentially connect people to one another rather than about divisions in the imagined community of the nations. He devises stories that overcome these divisions, constitute a fruitful mode of agreement that grows through hospitality and ethics, and propose a transcendent community composed of people who might be in conflict with one another