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.
Character Analysis
Lester Ballard
Lester Ballard is a man of divided self. He is both a traumatized child and a serial killer, a sorrowful loner and a violent animal. Lester is unsure of himself, who he is, and how to exist in the world. His childhood development arrested by the trauma of his violent orphaning, Lester’s progressive alienation from his former homeland transforms him into an unsocialized beast, someone who instead of learning how to think and interact with others learns only how to better indulge his deepest urges.
Lester’s existential insecurity manifests in speech in his inability to authentically express himself. For example, Lester says to John, the man jailed next to him, “[a]ll the trouble I ever was in […] was caused by whiskey or women or both. He’d often heard men say as much” (61). Unlike John, who expresses himself effortlessly, Lester can only parrot cliches. Unsocialized, perhaps as a result of his childhood trauma, Lester never learned to express himself; consequently, he has an undeveloped sense of self. Throughout the novel, he sheds what little sense of self he has and becomes pure id in his unfettered, fetishistic drive to fulfill his sexual urges,“[a] man much for himself” (47). This loss of a social face renders Lester animalistic, a fact Cormac McCarthy emphasizes through animalistic metaphor and through Lester’s increasing proximity to wildlife.
Lester’s increasingly animalistic actions and appearance trace his deterioration from man to beast. What makes Lester animalistic is the fact that he indulges his deviant sexual urges instead of repressing them. The first time Lester peeps on a couple at the Frog Mountain lookout he is all sense perception, no thought: “His breath was shallow, his eyes wide, his ears pricked to sort the voices from the ones on the radio” (25). McCarthy paints Lester as a timid predator whose intelligence is used solely to discern danger in the minutiae of its prey’s movements. When the boy scares Lester away, he becomes an ape scared by a more dominant one: “a misplaced and loveless simian shape scuttling across the turnaround” (26). After Lester burns down Mr. Waldrop’s cabin, animal characterization highlights this symbolic loss of Lester’s last semblance of humanity. For warmth, he makes a “nest of weeds” on the hearth, perches in it “like an owl,” then pokes through the ashes like a bird scavenging food (110). The fire renders Lester a mute, solitary bird exposed to the elements.
A key prop in Lester’s characterization is his rifle. His prized possession since childhood, Lester’s rifle—and his dead shot accuracy—symbolizes his confused ideas about pride and independence. The rifle is a double symbol of freedom and imprisonment. As a child, Lester works tirelessly to buy the rifle; to him, it is a symbol of maturity, power, and independence. His dead shot accuracy with it becomes the sole foundation for his scant self-esteem. However, the rifle becomes a shackle as Lester grows more isolated. Headed for the dump, Lester wears the “rifle on his neck like a yoke” (32). Further into his isolation, the rifle hangs in Lester’s hand “as if it were a thing he could not get shut of” (48). The rifle symbolizes a mythology of the supremacy of self-sufficiency: that a rifle makes a man a man, able to both provide for and defend himself and his property. Lester tethers himself to this ideal. However, after Lester’s humiliating failure to defend his farm, the rifle, the tool of this botched defense, becomes a reminder to Lester of his emasculation—a yoke of indignity that he can’t “get shut of.” Finally, in Lester’s gunfight with John Greer, Lester’s uncharacteristic miss of the first, easiest shot exemplifies his loss of facility with sophisticated tools. Later, when he digs to escape the cave, he uses only shards of rock. This loss of tool facility signifies Lester’s loss of humanity. He becomes pure animal instinct, pure id. This is what alienates Lester from others.
Sheriff Fate Turner
In the Gothic setting of Child of God, the sheriff’s name imbues his character with a vaguely supernatural aura: As it suggests, he has the power to alter fate. Sheriff Turner’s initial appearance in front of the courthouse in Sevierville projects the power he holds in the county. His pressed, tailored clothes and his “proprietary squint” suggest a man straddling the border between studied self-confidence and natural self-assurance. His commanding presence contrasts with Lester’s stooped, unsure figure; the sheriff is a foil to Lester.
The sheriff’s status confers his fate-turning ability: As the highest law-enforcement officer in isolated Sevier County, he wields almost absolute power. He isn’t a blind instrument of the law, but a man who enforces it at his discretion, sometimes in a biased way. Just as he didn’t intervene when Buster brained Lester, the sheriff doesn’t intervene when the woman from the lookout begins kicking the restrained Lester in the head. Instead of pursuing the two men who the woman said raped her, the sheriff arrests Lester. Finally, he doesn’t question the woman when she, seeing that Lester is the only one who’s going to be arrested, levies a false charge of rape against him. The sheriff exploits Lester’s brushes with the law to push him farther away from the community before he has committed any serious crimes. In doing so, the sheriff isn’t acting as a blind instrument of the law but as a malicious enforcer. Lester’s complaint that the sheriff has it out for him isn’t entirely unfounded.
The sheriff embodies a hypocrisy present in some characters, including Lester. To the hardware store owner Eustis, the sheriff says, “[s]ome people you cain’t do nothin with” (167). With this fatalistic sentiment, the sheriff ironically ignores the outsized power he has to influence the outcomes of people’s lives. (Lester also falls into such an irony with his adamance that the universe, not he, is responsible for his misfortune.) While in retrospect Sheriff Turner’s persecution of Part I Lester appears warranted—as if he sensed the crimes latent in Lester—it doesn’t appear this way in reality. In the opening scene of the novel, Sheriff Turner enforces the dispossession of Lester’s childhood home and tacitly condones the use of brutal violence against him. A half century earlier, such sheriff’s sales were common in Sevier County and helped consolidate land into the hands of the already wealthy (Cummings, William Joseph. Community, Violence, and the Nature of Change: Whitecapping in Sevier County, Tennessee, During the 1890’s. 1988. University of Tennessee, Masters Theses. TRACE, p. 36). In this historical context, Sheriff Turner’s presiding over this sale reads more as an ignoble first act of aggression against Lester, a tragic figure who has yet to commit any serious crime. In this way, Sheriff Turner resembles his predecessor, Sheriff Tom Davis, the historical sheriff of Sevier County in the 1890s whom Mr. Wade mentions in his history of vigilantism. Sheriff Davis used contentious means to pursue his nemeses, the Whitecaps, and ended their reign of terror with the execution of two convicted murders, an act McCarthy paints as cruel and unusual punishment. Similarly, Sheriff Turner uses questionable tactics in his crusade against his nemesis, Lester, a crusade that ends with the brutal flaying and evisceration of Lester’s corpse, an act more akin to medieval punishment than medical dissection. Embodying the theme of the violence inherent to humanity, Sheriff Turner employs unjust tactics to destroy Lester, however much he needed to be stopped.
John Greer
John Greer is the man who buys Lester’s farm at auction. Though he hardly appears on the page, he becomes the object of Lester’s wrath as the man who has usurped him. John is an outsider, coming from another part of Tennessee, Grainger County. Given the parochialism of the residents of Sevier County, this is significant. In his account of the auction, an anonymous choral voice implies through apophasis that locals dislike Greer in some way: “John Greer was from up in Grainger County. Not sayin nothin against him but he was” (17). That John is nonetheless allowed to move into the county, indeed who would stop him, is perhaps a source of further indignation for Lester—who, a lifelong resident, is nonetheless ostracized by his neighbors before he commits any crime.
John bears some similarities to the titular hero in the Old English epic poem Beowulf. Like Beowulf, John is an outsider of whom the locals are somewhat suspicious. And like Beowulf, John rids the locals of the humanoid monster terrorizing them, abducting people and killing them in its watery mountain lair, by dismembering the humanoid’s arm from him in battle.
Reubel the Dump Keeper
Ursine and voluble, Reubel is a foil to the slight and taciturn Lester. In Part I, Reubel reveals Lester—whose necrophilia and murdering are still in the future—in a more favorable light. Reubel beats his nine daughters for becoming pregnant, and when he finds one of them having sex with a boy, he rapes her. The account of this rape is immediately followed by a description of Lester’s arrivals at the dump. This juxtaposition emphasizes that—in Part I—Lester is far from the most depraved person in Sevier County. However, it isn’t that in Part I Lester is good and only becomes corrupted later; instead, it’s that—unlike Reubel, a physically powerful man whose underage daughters are captive to him—the small, family-less Lester hasn’t yet discovered how to harm women and get away with it. In this light, it’s fitting that Lester spends time drinking with Reubel, an abuser and a rapist.
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