52 pages • 1 hour read
Cormac McCarthyChild of God
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Fate in a World Without Grace
Like Cormac McCarthy’s other work, Child of God reimagines biblical themes and narratives in the modern world. Specifically, Child of God explores what it means if evil and violence are endogenous to humanity, the sentiment expressed by 2 Esdras 4:30 “For a grain of evil seed was sown in Adam’s heart from the beginning, and how much ungodliness it has produced until now, and will produce until the time of threshing comes!” (NSRV). In Child of God, this divine reckoning (“time of threshing”) never comes—and indeed symbols of the recurrence of violence suggest that it never will. The Appalachia of Child of God (and of McCarthy’s other two Appalachian novels, The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark) is a world without divine grace, without salvation. This foreclosure of the possibility of salvation raises the issue of fate: How, if humanity is indeed sown with an evil seed, can it rise above its inherent violence? Lester’s fate—and the return of similar violence augured by his entrails and doppelgänger—indicates that humanity is fated to be eternally violent.
Child of God suggests that if Sevier County is not godless, it’s at least godforsaken. With its allusion to the biblical flood, the flood of Sevierville and its environs connotes divine anger. One woman remarks that the flood is punishment for moral corruption. The hardware store owner, Eustis, muses to the Sheriff that Sevier County seems cursed by God. Just as the God of the Old Testament, exasperated by humanity’s corruption, decided to destroy humanity instead of fixing it—an act of abandonment, not reconciliation—so too the residents of Sevier County suffer the silence of divine abandonment.
There is no character more abandoned, more alone than Lester: Orphaned at nine, ostracized by his neighbors, and evicted from his childhood home, Lester sees nothing but emptiness when he looks to the heavens. In his cave with only his stuffed animals—and his corpses—for companionship, Lester stares through the smoke hole at “the remote and lidless stars of the Pleiades burn[ing] cold and absolute” (141). Instead of the absolute who loves humanity—God—Lester sees coldness and remoteness—the absolute indifference of the of the universe.
The world of Child of God is also a world in which the individual—contrary to the Christian doctrine of personal salvation held by Sevier Countians—doesn’t have ultimate control over their fate. Lester’s deterioration illustrates the extent to which other people influence the fate of the individual. The residents of the Sevier County McCarthy depicts are xenophobic, quick to judge, and condemnatory of those with ancestry they deem corrupt. Lester is condemned both by his family history—his grandfather and grand-uncle’s participation with the White Caps, his mother’s abandonment, and his father’s death by suicide—and by his “craziness,” which, as an anonymous choral voice says, was effected by his father’s death by suicide. Lester’s life is also proscribed in large part by Sheriff Fate Turner. While not guilty of Lester’s crimes, the Sheriff drives Lester into the places that conduce to them. Sevier countians like Sheriff Turner shoehorn Lester into a preordained narrative, affording him little room for salvation.
The Fear of Societal Breakdown
Gothic fiction often uses horror to explore cultural anxieties; Child of God, published in 1973, is no different. Through the character of Lester Ballard, McCarthy explores the fears of societal breakdown in 1960s America. These fears were not only of serial killers (see Cultural Context: The Serial Killings of the 1960s) but also broader fears of societal breakdown and annihilation: the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962; the assassination of JFK in 1963, followed by the televised assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald—an act of brazen vigilantism that disturbed millions of Americans ideas about public order; and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968. This decade of upheaval prompted many Americans to fear that the society they knew was deteriorating. McCarthy suggests that people like Lester Ballard don’t indicate societal breakdown but rather another cycle of violence in a long history of it.
Lester exemplifies the figure of the murderer next door that terrorized the public imagination in the 1960s. In some ways representative of the American public at large at the time, the parochial residents of Sevier County can fit evil into their worldview as long as it doesn’t live next door. As a native of Sevier County, Lester threatens this worldview. Try as the others do to ostracize Lester and his family before him, the Ballards remain part of the county. It’s even suggested that the Ballards will persist in the county, not in name but in type. Lester’s encounter with his doppelgänger on the church bus and the violent omens in his entrails suggest that a man like him, of the seed of Cain, is destined to return to the area. As an extreme expression of the societal problems and the repressed anomic urges of the residents of Sevier County, a Lester Ballard will always exist.
The reappearance of organized vigilantism in the gang that abducts Lester may seem like an indicator of a community trying to rectify the societal decline fretted over by some residents following the flood; however, as the history of vigilantism in the historical Sevier County shows, the re-emergence of vigilantism is actually a product of the ceaseless dialectic of conflict within every community. As Mr. Wade’s history of vigilantism reveals, there has always been a violent element in Sevier County. How it’s expressed changes—whether it’s the terrorism of the whitecaps, the counterterrorism of the bluebills, or the cruel and unusual punishment of the law—but violence persists. This violence is cyclical: the wave of vigilante violence in the 1890s abates, only to mutate and return a half century later after Lester’s murders and the violent response to them. McCarthy shows that fears of societal breakdown, such as those of 1960s America, are myopic: society is and has always been a facade of civility over humanity’s inherent cruelty and violence. As Mr. Wade remarks, “I think people are the same from the day God first made one” (172).
The Violence Inherent to Humanity
Violence is a theme common to McCarthy’s novels. In Child of God, as in his other work, McCarthy shows that civilizations are built on and maintained with violence. Violence is inherent to humanity, and not just in the seeming inevitability of people like Lester Ballard; within everyone is the seed of violence, of evil. The narrator describes Lester as “[a] child of God much like yourself perhaps” (11). Behind the joke is a serious invitation to consider one’s shared humanity with Lester. In Child of God, the use of direct address and the incorporation of historical vigilantism in Sevier County paint violence as an eternal fact of existence.
Twice in the novel, the third-person narrator addresses the reader in the second person to implicate them in violence inherent to human nature. The first use of direct address is the above quote from the first vignette, from which the novel takes its name. The second use appears after the flood drives Lester out of his cave and across a creek raging with runoff. A malevolent log, “something of animate ill will” (162), knocks him and his mock family of stuffed animals into the rapids below, establishing the animistic force at work in the scene. Though unable to swim, Lester is somehow able to thrash his way to shore out of the deep pool below the rapids. To explain this suspension of natural law, the narrator addresses the audience directly:
Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man’s life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him? (161).
McCarthy employs double entendre to make his point about our complicity in violence. The suspension of natural law, the “halt in the way of things,” is both a magical occurrence—one of many supernatural events in this Gothic novel—and an aporia in the moral law of the separation of good and evil. There is no such separation; one doesn’t have to be Lester Ballard to be guilty of violence. McCarthy and his narrator suggest that people are attracted to the lurid violence of people like Lester. The fascination with the macabre feeds the perpetrators of such violence. In this sense, people want the “wrong blood” of these perpetrators as morbid titillation, as expressions of their own repressed anomic urges. In a second sense, humans want to take the lives of these perpetrators, to spill their blood and in doing so symbolically purify themselves of the evil they express.
In the above quote, the group “in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration” recalls the vigilante gangs in Mr. Wade’s history (161), a history that interrogates what is just and what is unjust violence. The whitecaps believed they were righteous in meting out their own justice, and the bluebills believed they were righteous in fighting it. Similarly, Sheriff Tom Davis uses violence in his crusade against the whitecaps. His hanging of the two whitecaps convicted of murder—a spectacle attended by all of Sevierville—is a case of supposedly civilized people using violence to punish men they deem evil. However, McCarthy illustrates that capital punishment isn’t the stamp of a society ruled by law and order but a veil over a people as bloodthirsty as those they condemn. Mr. Wade’s account of the hanging illustrates this point. The hanging in the town square has the trappings of a civilized event, complete with vendors hawking sandwiches. On the scaffold, the condemned men sing a hymn, and the crowd joins them. The preachers say a prayer. However, what follows pops this charade of civility. Because the executioner uses the short drop method, the condemned men thrash in their nooses for 10 to 15 minutes before they die of strangulation. As Mr. Wade remarks, “Don’t ever think hangin is quick and merciful” (182).
McCarthy suggests that an evil like Lester cannot permanently be expelled from a community because it cannot be eradicated from people’s minds; violence is endogenous. Repressed violent urges always return, a fact symbolized by the resurfacing of the corpses in the final chapter.
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