This essay begins with Franco Morreti`s comment that the ideology underpinning the Bildungsroman constitutes “an escape from freedom.” It then applies this problem to Cormac McCarthy`s late-modernist novel Suttree (1979). Suttree takes the form of the Kunstlerroman, a variant of the Bildungsroman, and tells the story of Cornelius Suttree, a disaffected drifter, with artistic leanings, living on a houseboat in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late forties, early nineteen fifties. The aim is to trace the various existentialist themes in Suttree as a way of understanding McCarthy`s late-modernist response to a post-war America that has no place for the artist-dreamer, the typical hero of the classic Kuntstlerroman. In dialectical terms, the images of pollution and waste that accrue in the novel can be interpreted as metaphorical stages of transformation that aid the hero`s `escape to freedom.` During the course of the novel, McCarthy pits various existentialisms, mainly of the religious and Sartrean kind, against each other as a way of highlighting the choices on offer for this besieged artist. The late-modernist Kuntstlerroman can only offer a fragmented transfiguration. Therefore, in the refusebeatnik figure of Cornelius Suttree we see a new Kunstler -figure emerging: an artist bricoleur piecing together a new mosaic out of a decaying and shattered social order.