ABSTRACT
If Outer Dark is McCarthy’s most radically metaphysical text, Child of God is his most determinedly naturalistic. While there can be no mistaking the essential drives within Lester Ballard, troglodyte, murderer, necrophiliac, he is also presented as an American archetype in the typical McCarthy manner. He is informed by American mythology and values and compelled by his culture to seek a way of life that his American circumstances deny him. In characteristic McCarthy fashion Lester’s tale is told in a manner that relates the text to clearly discernable literary forebears, Faulkner still prominent among them. e literary method employed differs quite markedly from that of the two earlier novels although the social milieu remains the same; Child of God closes the sequence of Appalachian novels.¹ ere is an overt concern with “history” although it would have to be regarded as local rather than national in character. is makes the text less overtly mythic than is McCarthy’s other work, a characteristic emphasized by the naturalism mentioned above. However both the form and content of the text display a concern with the relation between history and myth and Lester Ballard’s literary and cultural antecedents are mythic in themselves. If this seems contradictory, I shall try to make the distinction clear in the analysis that follows. Despite the ghastly nature of his crimes Lester Ballard never entirely loses our sympathy; he remains a human figure to his awful and inevitable end. He is at one and the same time an inverted American hero and “A child of God much like yourself perhaps.”²
e narrative form of Child of God is unique in McCarthy’s oeuvre. e text is in three sections; the first of these, comprising almost half the novel, consists of twenty-five chapters, all of them short, some less than a page in length. Of these, eighteen are given in the authorial voice and the
remaining seven in the voices of unspecified members of the community of which Lester was, in some sense, a part. ese chapters feature the mountain vernacular and are in the form of personal reminiscence or “common knowledge.” In one case the reader is cast as a member of a listening group: the account of Lester’s grandfather and his claim to a Union pension, despite not having fought in the Civil War, concludes with the lines,
Talkin about Lester . . .
