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.