Child of God

Many scenes in Child of God evoke uncanniness: a dreadful or macabre sense of déjà vu. The uncanny is a motif common to Gothic fiction, a motif that Sigmund Freud analyzes in his 1919 paper “The Uncanny” (see Background). Cormac McCarthy evokes uncanniness through the juxtaposition of the childlike and the macabre, the personification of nature as a malevolent force, and the repetition or doubling of images. These motifs develop the theme of The Violence Inherent to Humanity.

The grotesque juxtaposition of the childlike and the macabre evokes sympathy for Lester by revealing the traumatized child beneath the depraved serial killer. Though the narrator John is unsympathetic to Lester, his account of Lester’s violent orphaning at the age of 9 or 10 suggests that finding his father corpse after he died by suicide prematurely ended his childhood. The trauma of this childhood denied arrests Lester’s development; he never fully exits the world of childhood. This is no more evident than in the preciousness of his giant stuffed animals. Playing the county fair game alone is ironic: Using the prized tool of his childhood—a rifle—Lester plays to win a prize not for his own child but for himself. Subsequently, he almost parades through the crowd, showing off his skill in winning the best prizes as a proud child would. The giant stuffed animals become uncanny when Lester arranges them on his mattress as a child would: “The two bears and the tiger watch from the wall, their plastic eyes shining in the firelight and their red flannel tongues out” (76). These familiar childhood comforts are unsettling because they’re out of place, in a dilapidated cabin with a corpse in the next room. Lester’s arrangement of them suggests the childlike belief in dolls and stuffed animals as living companions; however, their stuck-out tongues taunt Lester, displaying in their artificiality that he remains utterly alone. Of course, Lester is ignorant of this irony and still treats his stuffed animals as stand-ins for the family he lost, as shown in his attempt to recover them after nearly drowning in the creek crossing.

The personification of nature as a malevolent force—and the apparent omnipotence of Lester’s thoughts in the supernatural realization of his commands—further emphasizes Lester’s reversion to a childlike state of mind in which magical thinking prevails. Lester often addresses nature as an animate force intent on harming him. When, for example, he attempts to ford the creek engorged by storm water, a log appearing out of nowhere targets him with “animate ill will” (165), knocking him and his possessions into the rapids below. After dragging himself ashore, Lester brandishes his rifle at the creek and the rain, cursing them for trying to kill him. Lester animistic perception of the world extends to the apparent omnipotence of his thoughts, introducing the specter of the supernatural to the reader’s mind. After he mortally wounds the elder Lane daughter, he commands, “[d]ie, goddamn you,” and she immediately does (129). In Part III after Lester trudges through the snow to John Greer’s farm only to find him absent, Lester orders the snow to fall faster, and it does (151). In both cases, Lester’s isolation and fury render these coincidences uncanny. An apparent victim of a malicious natural world, Lester himself also appears able to wield some malevolent, supernatural force.

The repetition of macabre images instills in the reader the sense that the violence depicted isn’t an anomaly perpetrated by one man but instead an eternally recurrent feature of the landscape. Freud writes that the involuntary repetition of events in an uncanny atmosphere “forces upon us the idea of something fateful and unescapable” (Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Translated by Alix Strachey. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, p. 11). McCarthy exploits this phenomenon to develop his theme of the violence inherent to humanity. Playing on the classic uncanniness of corpses that appear alive, McCarthy describes twice the apparent reanimation of Lester’s victims. The first description is of Lester hauling his first corpse into the loft of the cabin: “She rose slumpshouldered from the floor with her hair all down and began to bump slowly up the ladder. Halfway up she paused, dangling. Then she began to rise again” (104). The use of the first person and active voice in the construction of the sentences—as well as the omission of Lester’s efforts—makes it seem as if the woman herself is climbing the ladder. The second description of reanimation is of the police extracting the corpses from the sinkhole. The situation is already uncanny—a case of something strange rendered eerily familiar. The sudden disgorgement of the bodies from their tomb is horrific yet familiar: Bodies are meant to be buried in the earth; they aren’t meant to be exhumed. This uncanniness is compounded by the repeated image of the reanimated corpse: “The rope drew taut and the first of the dead sat up on the cave floor, the hands that hauled the rope above sorting the shadows like puppeteers” (209). The use of the rope to haul up the corpse and the active construction of the sentence—it is not, “the rope drew taut, raising up the first of the dead” but, “the first of the dead sat up”—recall Lester’s earlier manipulation of his victim, suggesting a sense of uncanny recurrence. This effect is heightened by the appearance of Lester’s boyhood doppelgänger (another type of repetition) and by the medical students’ reading in Lester’s entrails omens of “monsters worse to come” (207). Combined, the juxtaposition of the childlike and the macabre; the personification of nature as primeval, malevolent force; and the proliferation of doubles, whether repeated images or doubled characters, evoke dread and the uncanny feeling that the events of the novel are just one cycle of an eternal recurrence of violence.