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.
Part 1, Pages 11-46Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Pages 11-19 Summary
In Sevier County, Tennessee, a crowd gathers for the auction of Lester Ballard’s farm, which the state has seized. Lester is a small, unkempt man of “Saxon and Celtic bloods” (11) that the narrator states may be much like the reader. The only surviving member of his family, Lester has lived on the farm his entire life.
The auctioneer has arranged a band, a lemonade stand, and a giveaway of silver dollars to draw a crowd. Lester lurks nearby in the barn, where there hangs the rope that his father used to die by suicide.
The auctioneer begins his pitch: The land, full of young timber, is a good investment for the future and the best in the county. As the auctioneer’s voice echoes through the valley, it takes on an unearthly, ghostly quality.
Lester emerges from the barn with his rifle and confronts the auctioneer. The auctioneer warns Lester that the sheriff, Fate Turner, is present and that Lester’s continued harassment will land him in a psychiatric hospital. He goads Lester to use the rifle.
The scene continues in the next section, in which the narration switches from the third person to an anonymous first-person narrator. Throughout Part I, the narration periodically switches to unnamed residents of Sevier County, who recount stories of Lester.
The anonymous narrator notes that present at the auction is the man who buys Lester’s entire property, John Greer, an outsider from another part of Tennessee. While Lester is accosting the auctioneer, another man, Buster, strikes Lester on the head with the blunt side of an axe. Lester collapses, his eyes cross, and blood runs from his ears. Sheriff Turner and his deputy take Lester away, and the auction continues. Lester’s injury permanently alters the way he holds his head.
The third section switches back to third-person narration, in which Lester visits one of his only friends, a bootlegger named Fred Kirby. Lester wants to trade a pocket knife for a jar of whiskey, but Fred can’t find his stash, because he was drunk when he hid it.
Part 1, Pages 20-29 Summary
Lester moves into a mountain cabin abandoned by its owner, a man named Mr. Waldrop. Lester clears the cabin of refuse and has a dinner of a cigarette and a potato roasted over an oil lamp. When he lies down, he sees a snake above him in the rafters. Lester dislodges the snake, which slithers away, and goes to sleep thirsty.
Another anonymous narrator recounts a story from when he and Lester were in school. Lester lost a softball in a patch of briars and ordered a younger boy, Finney, to retrieve it. Finney refused, and Lester threatened to hit him. Seeing that Finney wasn’t going to do as asked, Lester punched him in the face. This incident made the narrator dislike Lester.
Switching back to the third person, the narrative finds Lester spying on a couple at a popular lovers’ lane: the lookout on Frog Mountain. Lester sneaks up to the car. Through the window, he glimpses, “A pair of white legs sprawled embracing a shade, a dark incubus that humped in a dream of slaverous lust” (26). Lester masturbates by the car, alerting the couple to his presence. The boy jumps out, sending Lester scurrying away.
Another anonymous narrator recounts another story from Lester’s past. When Lester was 9 or 10, his mother left, leaving just Lester and his father. Soon thereafter Lester’s father died by suicide. Lester found his body and went to the store to report it to the narrator and another man, who both helped Lester cut down his father’s body. The father’s blackened, distended face haunts the narrator.
The narrator remarks that after the fight, Lester looked almost as bad as his dead father. He also recounts the story of a local man, Gresham, who, when asked to speak at his wife’s funeral, sang a comically inappropriate song, “the chickenshit blues” (29). The narrator remarks that even Gresham isn’t as unhinged as Lester.
Part 1, Pages 30-46 Summary
The narrative switches back to the third person. One night as Lester sleeps in his cabin, he hears something scamper across the floor and jump through the window. It turns out to be a fox being chased by a pack of hounds belonging to a hunter, who is engaging in a nocturnal fox hunt. The yelping dogs swarm into Lester’s cabin, blocking the door, then break through the closed window, leaving a yawning hole. Lester seizes the last dog and beats it.
On a rainy summer day, Lester travels through the woods to the dump, past forgotten monoliths from an old quarry. Lester sometimes goes to the dump to share a drink with the dump keeper, Reubel, and to gawk at his blonde daughter (who is unnamed in the story). She is the second to youngest, laughs a lot, and sits with her legs open. The fact that she wears different color underwear every day entrances Lester.
Reubel’s nine daughters spend their days wandering in a silent daze through the dump. Eventually, they all get pregnant by local boys, and Reubel beats them for it. One day, Reubel rapes one of his daughters after finding her having sex with a boy in the woods.
On this rainy summer day, Lester encounters the blonde daughter with a man. She offers to show Lester her breasts for a quarter, but he doesn’t have one. Her jokes and confidence fluster him. When she strolls away, telling the two men that “if you’ns ever got any of this you never would be satisfied again” (37), Lester agrees with the man that he’d risk it.
In the next section, Lester walks in on a church service. The congregation whispers to themselves about his presence. No one turns to glare when he sniffles throughout the service: They think Lester wouldn’t stop sniffling for “God himself” (38), so they don’t bother.
Through the summer, Lester subsists on frogs he shoots and corn grown for livestock, which he steals. In late summer, bass appear in the creek, and Lester meticulously sets up with his rifle to shoot one. Suddenly, Waldrop’s cattle cross the creek upstream, clouding the water with mud. Cursing the animals, Lester shoots at them and, to his dismay, hits one, which collapses. In the following section, a narrator named John wonders why Mr. Waldrop doesn’t pursue Lester for killing his cow or for burning down his cabin, foreshadowing the accidental fire Lester causes the coming winter.
Another anonymous narrator recounts that Lester once owned a cow. Fed up with her stubbornness, he looped a rope around her neck to try to move her with a tractor but broke her neck. Two years prior at the county fair, a man named Trantham, who was fed up with his oxen, lit a fire under them. They dragged their wagon over his legs, breaking them.
Lester returns to the dump; the blonde daughter has run away with one of her sisters. Followed by a stray dog, Lester leaves to scavenge in the abandoned quarry. When Lester continues on and calls to the dog, it doesn’t follow.
Part 1, Pages 11-46 Analysis
In the first half of Part I, Cormac McCarthy fosters sympathy for Lester Ballard while foreshadowing his crimes. This builds tension: The reader becomes invested in Lester and engaged in the plot, which explores fraught topics like necrophilia and The Violence Inherent to Humanity.
The main narrative begins with a scene of cruelty that establishes the theme of the violence inherent to human nature: Lester’s neighbors celebrating the loss of his family home. Ostensibly, the occasion is an auction; however, the language McCarthy employs suggests that it’s more than that. The crowd first appears as “a caravan of carnival folk” who set up a band and a lemonade stand (11). This festive atmosphere clashes with Lester’s grieving, indignant mood. The auctioneer’s pitch—and his giveaway of silver dollars—develops this contrast: He frames the purchase of the land as the securement of a future for the buyer. The unsaid corollary is that the sale is the revocation of Lester’s future; the prosperity of one entails the destitution of another. This cutthroat reality becomes violently manifest in Buster’s assault on Lester. Braining Lester with an axe is a disproportionate response to Lester confronting the auctioneer: as the auctioneer’s unconcern with taunting the armed Lester indicates, Lester is just posturing and isn’t going to use his rifle. The attack injures both Lester’s body and his pride: There is the double entendre of physical and spiritual injury in the anonymous first-person narrator’s statement that “Lester Ballard never could hold his head right after that” (17). The severity of the physical injury—Lester bleeds from his ears after getting hit and is permanently maimed—opens the possibility that a brain injury plays a role in Lester’s devolution. The attack also damages Lester’s self-esteem—he is humiliated in his attempt to defend his childhood home. The brutality of Buster’s attack—and the Sheriff’s tacit approval of it—inaugurates the dialectic of conflict between Lester and the residents of Sevier County.
McCarthy builds sympathy for Lester by juxtaposing the main, third-person limited-omniscient narrative with the anonymous first-person narration, which functions as a Greek chorus. When interleaved with the main narrative, these anonymous anecdotes serve two purposes: First, they humanize Lester by revealing both the tragedy of his childhood and his similarity to the other residents of Sevier County. Second, they foreground the callousness of those residents to Lester. On Lester being orphaned in a horrific way—the event, by consensus, that forever altered Lester (29)—the anonymous narrator focuses only on their distress at seeing Lester’s dead father: “I wisht if a man wanted to hang hisself he’d do it with poison or somethin so folks wouldn’t have to see such a thing as that [Lester’s father’s distended face]” (29). The anonymous narrator faults Lester’s father—and, in a culture that prizes ancestry, faults Lester by extension—for causing him distress. Furthermore, this same narrator’s remark on the blank way in which Lester reported the news to them, “He come in the store and told it like you’d tell it was rainin out” (29), has an air of reproach, as if they read in Lester’s reaction not stunned disbelief but aberration, an augury of his crimes to come. This callousness and self-centeredness in the face of the tragedy of Lester’s childhood evoke in the reader the same indignation Lester feels at his victimization by his neighbors.
Though treated as an undesirable, Lester shares much with his neighbors. Lester’s folly with his stubborn cow resembles Trantham’s folly with his oxen. Driven by blind frustration, both men comically effect their own misfortune: Lester kills valuable livestock, and Trantham has his legs broken by his own wagon. Furthermore, the appearance of the bootlegger Kirby reveals that Lester isn’t the only seedy character in Sevier County. Finally, the dump keeper Reubel acts as a foil, casting Part I Lester in a more favorable light. Reubel’s abuse of his daughters—and his rape of one of them—makes Lester’s lascivious interactions with Reubel’s blonde daughter appear near-harmless in comparison. Part I Lester isn’t as anomalous—or as immoral—as Sheriff Turner or the choral voice of the anonymous narrators malign him as.
Related Titles
By Cormac McCarthy
