Child of God

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

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